Reproductive Health During the Corona Virus Pandemic

COVID-19: Are you prepared to serve your clients?

Preparing as a Doula, Lactation Consultant, or Perinatal Educator

As infectious disease specialists continue to study the impacts for population groups, health care personnel are receiving guidance to best care for infected persons, to create isolation protocols and other containment practices, to protect staff from infection and to organize emergency response plans. For providers who work outside of hospital or clinic settings, particularly in private practice, there is a need for accurate information and the establishment of transmission –specific protocols.

As doula, perinatal educators, LCs in private practice, are excluded from centralized information sharing, providers of reproductive health support services need access to best practice guidelines. If you’re caring for families in this way, how are you going to be responding?

Let’s together do what we can to do what we do best: keeping families informed, supported, healthy and well.

Latest Updates

Jun 30 2020

Doulas are Essential Workers

In my last blog post "COVID-19: Are you prepared to serve your clients", I posed the question about COVID-19: “Are you prepared to serve your clients?”. At that time it was early days of the global pandemic with just 1200 confirmed cases of COVID-19 and a dozen reported deaths. Now with more than 10.3 million confirmed infections and 500,000+ ...

parenting super powers. facing the difficult.

Apr 6 2020

Home or Hospital? Let’s choose fearlessly.

Exploring birth options during the coronavirus pandemic isn't what anyone expected. In our earlier blog, we explored the conditions that would make out of hospital birth a safe and feasible alternative for families exploring birth options during the pandemic. But informed decision-making involves a process more complex than weighing risks and benefits. Is the choice fear driven? If so, is ...

Mar 31 2020

Should you use PPE in the home setting when caring for the parent/infant dyad?

For those providers who are working with pregnant persons or new parents and their newborns, balancing the directive “assume your pregnant patient is an infected person” (Breslin, et. al, 2020) with the need to prioritize access of PPE for those who work in medical centers directly caring for actively symptomatic infected persons leaves us with logistic, moral and ethical dilemmas. ...

Mar 31 2020

Is homebirth a safe option for families during the coronavirus pandemic?

You're fielding questions about home birth from clients who hadn't considered it until now. Here are some considerations... Lots of families are afraid. They don’t want to go to the hospital. They’re asking about home birth. How should you respond? In this 2 part blog series, we look at implications for maternity care delivery methods, possibilities for these extraordinary ...

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More Learning Opportunities

Training Program

COVID-19: Best Practices Online Course

For Doulas, Lactation Consultants and Perinatal Educators

COVID-19 will be impacting us for the foreseeable future.

If you work with expectant families, you know how important it is to manage fears and to support trust and confidence. Families will rely on us to be prepared, to be knowledgable and to be reassuring. How can you learn what you need to know so that you can be effective?

We’ve updated our course in July, 2020, to support your practice and your safety with Best Practice Guidelines. Be prepared to care for others safely.

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Instructor:

Karen Laing, IBCLC, AMT is a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teacher and has worked in reproductive health care for more than 25 years, both providing care and training and mentoring midwives, doulas, and lactation consultants.

Training Program

First Year Specialist / Postpartum Doula

If you’re exploring starting a doula program, or establishing more consistent training standards, the training and ongoing mentorship available through WisdomWay Institute is unmatched. While many groups emphasize the business of caring for families, we focus on the skills involved with caring for families, including not only solid training in lactation support, postpartum health, newborn and infant development and wellbeing, and emotional health/mood disorders, but a training that is designed to prevent burnout, cultivate deep listening and establish a Relationship-Centered model of care.

Our programs are designed to earn the trust of families, referral partners, and community stakeholders who are looking for providers who have skills, knowledge, and a framework for delivering care that is safe, compassionate, equitable, and carefully organized around a scope of practice framework.

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When we get caught up in hope, happiness relies on a certain outcome. To be a heartful caregiver, we abandon that ‘goal’ oriented way of thinking and we train to be in full and fearless contact with what is actually happening, not what might be or what might be escaped. When we convey confidence, and compassion, we offer something more unconditional, more authentic, than hope. Hope can come and go, but this kind of caring, is boundless.

– Karen Laing

"Let’s do this work together to bring the kind of caring presence that heals"

Karen Laing