A highly demanding profession: midwifery. Do the midwives who provide sensitive support for birthing women feel satisfied and appreciated?

Abstract

Introduction. Midwifery is a physically and emotionally exhausting profession. The type of calming, reassuring behaviour required from midwives when providing support for birthing women often takes its toll on their wellbeing. The large workloads they are requested to manage along with traumatic birth events might lead to compassion fatigue and burnout. Accompanying stress may result in feelings of being overloaded, as well as low levels of satisfaction and appreciation. Aim. Our study aim was to discover the incidence and degree to which midwives are affected by high workloads in their work, as well as how satisfied and respected, appreciated they feel in their profession. Our additional goal was to see whether there is connection between burnout and the characteristics mentioned above. Material and method. Our questionnaire collected information on socio-demographic data and health-related issues accompanied by work overload, satisfaction and appreciation. The final part was the maslach burnout inventory (mbi). from the 283 completed and returned questionnaires 275 were finally included in the study. data were analysed using the SPS. Results. Our results show that almost two thirds (65.9%) of the sample were satisfied either 'mostly' or 'fully', only every fourth midwife in our study (25.3%) felt appreciated in her everyday work. More than two thirds (69.1%) of midwives complain of being overloaded at work. regarding the various factors of burnout: the factor of emotional exhaustion seemed to have the strongest relationship with all three perceived work characteristics; depersonalization and reduced personal accomplishment also proved to be strongly associated with satisfaction. We have discovered a strong relationship between satisfaction and appreciation (r =.333). Conclusions. We conclude that seeing how essential midwives' committed support is for birthing women and their families, midwives' needs should be taken into consideration and the emotional aspects of midwives' work should be kept in focus. © Borgis.