Today's post comes from Madeline Lutz, who will be graduating very soon!
Having just finished what I consider to be a difficult
apprenticeship and hearing from other students that most apprenticeships are
often wrought with bad feelings at some point, I wanted to write a little
something about how to make an apprenticeship less difficult. Midwifery is
stressful and draining and exhausting, and there’s no way to get around that
fact. But midwifery is also amazing and joyful and can fill you up in a way
that nothing else can. I think there needs to be a model that focuses on those
good things and minimizes as much as possible the negatives. As it stands,
there are too many midwifery hopefuls who “can’t cut it” or who “burn out.” The
main reason for this is that midwifery apprenticeships have too much of the bad
and not enough of the good. I think there is a way to make it better and my
belief is that the three pillars of a successful apprenticeship for both the
midwife and the student are expectation, communication, and evaluation.
Expectations
is the place to start with almost everything. In any business relationship it
is extremely important for each party’s expectations to be clear from the
outset. An understanding must be reached that is pleasing and acceptable to
both parties in order to know what to shoot for and what to evaluate in the
future. Examples of this in a midwifery apprenticeship are how many hours are
students expected to work doing tasks for the midwife such as charting,
stocking, or cleaning each week. What appointments does the midwife expect a
student to come to and when will those appointments be held? How much time off
call will the student have and when? There are numerous possible answers to all
of these questions. There is no one way for a midwifery apprenticeship to work.
The goal of discussing clear expectations is to find out how this midwife and this student want the apprenticeship to work in order to meet both
of their needs.
The next
pillar of a successful apprenticeship is communication. Communication is
imperative to any successful business relationship; therefore, it is important
that one of the expectations laid out is that if one party feels like things
are not going as they had hoped, or expected, that it is ok to bring it up and
that the other party will have a respectful conversation with them. Another
reason for the importance of communication is that while many of the bigger expectations have been set, there
will still be many little expectations that pop up in our mind along the way,
such as “I think I’m ready to take heart tones during labor,” “I feel like the
midwife is taking advantage of my days off,” “I don’t feel appreciated for the
hard work I did cleaning the office on Saturday.” Those little thoughts that we
don’t even realize are expectations can get out of control and can develop into
resentment if we aren’t careful. Successful apprenticeships will have big
expectations laid out in the beginning of the apprenticeship as well as little
expectations being made clear over and over again through communication
throughout the apprenticeship.
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| Photo Courtesy of Flickr, CC license |
The final
pillar of a successful apprenticeship is evaluation. It is much easier to
evaluate a situation when the expectations of how the situation should be
working are clear and when communication is allowed and encouraged. One of the
expectations laid out in the beginning of the relationship should be a timeline
for regularly scheduled meetings where each party will evaluate and discuss if
their expectations are being met and make a plan to meet them if not. Regularly
scheduled meetings for evaluation will allow for the clear communication
necessary for both parties to feel heard, respected and cared for. Evaluation
meetings are also a time to adjust expectations as oftentimes the reality is
much different than that same thing in theory.
Expectation,
communication, and evaluation are the three pillars to a successful
apprenticeship. I think if every preceptor and student appreciated their
importance, we would have less resentment and discourse in midwifery
apprenticeships overall. All of us are working towards the same thing: positive
birth experiences for mothers, for babies, and for families. In order for us to
provide that service to more women, we need more student midwives to complete
their apprenticeships. I believe if more apprenticeships were built on these
three pillars, we would have more midwives, help more women, and the world
would in turn become a better place.
