Childbirth Environment: Nurse's Role

Video Transcript

"If you choose to give birth in a hospital, the person that you're going to be dealing with most is the nurses. And that can be very positive, or it might be negative at times. The nurse’s job is not to manage your pain, she is not going to help you with pain relief. She will be able to offer you medication though, but she's not going to try to necessarily be able to get you in different positions, or suggest ways to deal with your pain. The nurses are very busy. What a nurse's job is, is to monitor your vital signs, monitor your baby's vital signs, check on the baby's heart rate, and also watch your contractions. The nurse has to monitor and chart all this information and get it all usually into a computerized system. The nurse also is the liaison with your doctor or caregiver. So she's the one that's going to be letting your doctor knowing what's going on and keeping them afoot of where in stages of labor that you are. If you need an I.V., or any type of medication that is, goes though an I.V., the nurse is going to be the one to give that to you. If you get an epidural, an anesthesiologist will be called in by the nurse to give that to you. Sometimes you get a nurse that is wonderful, that works great, she is definitely on board with however you want to give birth and is extremely helpful. Sometimes though you can get a nurse that might already have an idea of how she wants your labor to go and maybe you're not making the same choices that she would like you to make. If you find that you have a nurse that doesn't get along with you well, or you just feel like your personalities aren't getting along, feel free to have your partner go and ask the head or charge nurse to be assigned a different nurse. You can just really politely say, "you know what, I just don't think our personalities are quite the same", or you could say something like, "you know, my wife really wants to have a natural childbirth, we've asked her not to ask, not to offer pain medication and she keeps offering it and telling us it's just easier to get the pain medication". So if you truly feel that the nurse is not right for you, feel free to speak up about it. Also nurses do twelve hour shifts, they usually work from 6:00 am to 6:00pm or 8:00 am to 8:00 pm, so it's a good chance that at some point you are going to get a different nurse. As long as you are aware of that it's, usually the change is really nice and easy, but it's just good to know in advance that you're not going to necessarily give birth with the same nurse that you started with. So when you're in the hospital it's good to, to know the role of a nurse and how she or he is going to be there to help you."