How does Abundance Midwifery support medication safety in pregnancy?
At Abundance Midwifery Service, our goal is to provide the best possible care and advice for our clients. This includes helping them determine the impact of any medications they’re taking on their pregnancy. When a client asks if a medication that I’m familiar with is OK to take, I make an immediate recommendation. However, if it’s one I don’t know much about I generally go to mothertobaby.org for help.
How does mothertobaby.org help with the safety of medication in pregnancy?
Mothertobaby.org is a free resource with many great features including medication safety support for birth professionals and mothers. They even have researchers available who can take your call to discuss a specific topic. However, it’s easy to go directly to their website and look up lots of information on your own. In addition, if what you’re looking for is frequently asked about, you’re likely to find helpful fact sheets and videos about it.
Can you offer an example of helping a client with medication safety in pregnancy?
I recently had a patient taking an antibiotic who was fearful that it could hurt her pregnancy. It was one that I was not close to regarding fetal impacts. So, I looked up the antibiotic at mothertobaby.org and found helpful facts and what studies have shown about it.This is not information from drug manufacturers, it's what actually happened to pregnant women and to their babies. So, it's objective. This research allowed me to make the right recommendations to my client about their antibiotic.
As a professional, are there other reasons why you like mothertobaby.org?
There are several other reasons why I use mothertobaby.org and recommend it to my clients. First, if I speak to someone there, after our discussion they send me an email with a transcript of what was said. Getting everything verbally and in writing is extremely helpful and efficient. I can also ask a question and if the researcher doesn’t have an immediate answer, they’ll follow up and then get back to me. It’s also worth mentioning that being able to talk to someone sometimes exposes things about a topic I may not have considered. Lastly, the researchers can reduce the time it takes for me to get the right answer. Recently, I spoke to someone at mothertobaby.org about pregnancy risks from exposure to coxsackievirus. This is the virus known as hand, foot, and mouth disease. It turned out that the researcher was a doctor who summarized everything so I didn't have to read many long studies and articles.
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