ABSTRACT
When I (RD) was a community midwife I used to describe to my colleagues feeling ‘worn out’ and ‘psychologically drained’ and that I needed to ‘recharge’. Similar feelings had occurred as a hospital-based midwife but I became more aware of my emotions during community midwifery. Listening compassionately to women, empathising with them, protecting them and often absorbing their ‘feelings’ was beginning to pay its price. It came as no surprise to me when my PhD work revealed a group of community mid wives whose emotional well-being had become compromised. This chapter reports some of the findings from an action research study and how emotion work (Hochschild 1983) was experienced by a team of National Health Service (NHS) community midwives. The study comprised three phases. Phase one involved individual in-depth interviews with the midwives. Phase two involved focus groups, workshops and the introduction of clinical supervision so that the ‘emotional disturbance’ of caring work could ‘be felt within the safer setting of the supervisory relationship, where it can be survived, reflected upon and learnt from’ (Hawkins and Shohet 1989:3). Phase three comprised final individual interviews with the midwives. Although the midwives were community-based the organisational culture of the hospital, and changes happening within it, had had a major impact, often to their detriment.
