H1 - Promoting Healthy Births Using Evidence-Based Physiologic Approaches

Increasing access to care that promotes and supports physiologic birth is a major national strategy for achieving high-quality, high-value maternity care. The American College of Nurse Midwives has launched a multidisciplinary/multi-stakeholder initiative to promote education, resources and policies that strategically promote physiologic birth on a national scale. One of the outcomes of this initiative is the development of a health care provider focused physiologic birth tool kit www.BirthTOOLS.org. Birth TOOLS (tools to optimize outcomes of labor safely) is a web based tool kit that includes a menu of change targeting key areas of practice that can enhance women’s opportunities to experience normal physiologic childbirth. It is a one stop shopping site which houses multiple components including policies, education programs, exemplar protocols and audit tools; everything needed to put the goal of promoting physiologic birth into action! The focus of this presentation is to highlight the value of this resource for use in hospital settings, including how it can be incorporated into maternity care quality improvement and safety efforts. Following an introduction to the site a panel of midwifery leaders will then speak to their success, challenges and recommendations related to changing maternity care practices on the unit and system level to support physiologic birth.