Smooth Transitions: How Midwives, Hospitals, EMS and Birthing Families All Benefit
Monday, April 24th, 2023
MEAC CEUs applied for
Further Reading
Smooth Transitions is an example of a successful midwifery-led collaborative QI program designed to enhance the patient and caregiver experience by improving the process of hospital transfers from planned community-based births.
This webinar, led by experts in the field of midwifery, interprofessional collaboration, and maternity care highlights an overview of Smooth Transitions' history, the challenges and barriers that arise when transfers to hospital care occur, and the importance of effective collaboration between midwives, hospitals, EMS, and birthing families when planned community births need to be transferred to hospital care.
Attendees gain a deeper understanding of the benefits of effective interprofessional collaboration including improved communication, reduced medical errors, and increased patient satisfaction.
The webinar explores how Smooth Transitions continues to grow and adapt to meet the needs of the communities it serves, describes new initiatives and projects that are currently in development and discusses how Smooth Transitions can serve as a model for implementing similar programs throughout the country.
The webinar concludes with a 30-minute Q&A session for participants to ask questions and engage in a discussion with the presenters about the Smooth Transitions program, its impact, future directions, and advice for implementing similar midwifery-led collaboratives in their own communities.
Presenters
Karen Hays, DNP, CNM, ARNP (she/her pronouns) has been a perinatal nurse since 1986 and a midwife since 1992, initially as an LM-CPM and then as a CNM. Karen's clinical experience in the U.S. includes home births, freestanding birth centers, community hospitals, and academic medical centers. Karen has also been involved in global midwifery for 35 years, as a learner, educator, consultant, and clinician in remote areas, post-conflict and disaster zones, and refugee settlements across Asia, Africa, and Latin America to support midwifery education, practice, and respect within the health system.
In addition to being part of the Smooth Transitions Leadership team, Karen is a Pronto International master trainer, a co-founder of the American College of Nurse-Midwives Disaster Caucus, a consultant for Global Health Medica Project, and a volunteer with the Seattle-King County Public Health-Medical Reserve Corps and Health Leadership International. She is also a co-creator of Bastyr University’s Maternal Child Health Systems online graduate program for midwives and doulas. Karen is motivated by her belief that midwives, wherever they work, deserve robust support that enables them to best serve their clientele who have the right to be treated with dignity regardless of their circumstances.
Melissa Denmark, MA, LM has a BA in Biology from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill and a master’s degree in Medical Anthropology from the University of Florida. Her master’s thesis documented the historical development of direct-entry midwifery in Florida and was published in Robbie Davis-Floyd’s book, Mainstreaming Midwives: The Politics of Change (2006).
After graduate school, Melissa attended the Seattle Midwifery School and was licensed as a midwife in Washington state in 2004. From 2006 to 2021 Melissa worked as a community midwife in a home birth-based private practice and in 2016, she became the Program Coordinator for the Smooth Transitions Quality Improvement program.
Audrey Levine LM, CPM-Retired is a retired CPM who had a solo home birth practice in Olympia, WA for 14 years. After closing her practice in 2015, she turned her attention full-time to midwifery policy and advocacy work. She was President of MAWS from 2008-2012 and chair of the MAWS Legislative and Health Policy Committee for 18 years. In 2012, she joined the NACPM Board and served as co-President with Tanya Khemet Taiwo from 2016-2019. She has been involved with Smooth Transitions since its inception in 2009 and is currently co-Chair of the program's Leadership Team. She is also the Program Director for the Community Birth Data Registry at the Foundation for Health Care Quality in Seattle.