ABSTRACT
Now that mothers’ and fathers’ experiences regarding traumatic childbirth have been addressed in this book, we turn our gaze in this chapter to the impact that being present at traumatic births can have on nurses and other clinicians. The following sections are addressed in this chapter: definition of secondary traumatic stress, research on secondary traumatic stress in clinicians, instruments available to screen health care providers, and interventions for secondary traumatic stress reported in the literature. Labor and delivery nurses’ perspectives on traumatic childbirth are considered towards the end of the chapter. Experiences of five obstetrical nurses who were selected from a mixed methods research study Cheryl conducted on secondary traumatic stress in labor and delivery nurses are presented (Beck & Gable, 2012).
