Sages-Femmes Rouge Valley Midwives | Serving Scarborough and Durham.

Choosing midwifery care means you are choosing a distinct style of maternity care, focussed on childbirth as a normal healthy process, continuity of care and informed choice. Midwives work as independent primary caregivers and are funded to provide comprehensive care to women and their families during pregnancy, birth and the first six weeks postpartum. Our services are an alternate to, not in addition to, medical and nursing care, for normal pregnancy and childbirth. If complications arise, we work in a team with medical and nursing professionals.

We provide prenatal care in our clinic, attend labour and birth at home and in the hospital, and provide early postnatal care in the woman's home and later postnatal care in our clinic. Midwifery care for planned hospital births includes monitoring labour at home, transfer to hospital late in active labour with first babies and in well established labour for subsequent births, and early discharge (usually within 4 hours after the birth) from the hospital, with postpartum care provided by your midwives at home.

The emphasis in midwifery care is on birth as a normal physiologic process and an important life event and in supporting women to make informed choices. As primary caregivers our role is limited to normal pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum. Midwives provide a low intervention style of care that seeks to avoid the routine use of drugs and technology. Midwives work together with women and their partners and support people to use alternatives to birth technology. One example in the prenatal period is using careful history taking rather than routine ultrasound to establish a woman's expected date of birth. During labour and birth, midwives use water, position changes, hands-on comfort measures and emotional support to reduce the need for pain-relieving drugs. Although the use of technology and drugs is sometimes necessary and is always open to midwifery clients when needed, women find that they do not need them as much when they have the one-on-one nurturing care of midwives.