Page 21 - Non-western women in maternity care in the Netherlands • Exploring ‘inadequate’ use of prenatal care and the experiences of care professionals

that the importance of this and the application procedure are not always understood. This lack of knowledge of the maternity care system is sometimes also seen among partners of clients, who try to insist on care being provided as they expect it to be.
Sometimes we assume that people know how it works at a birth, but there are a lot of people planning a short-stay hospital birth who think, ‘Now we’re going to the hospital and we’ll be looked after by someone else’. And sometimes they’re surprised to see that we [the midwives] go along with them, ‘Hey, aren’t we going to the hospital?’ ‘But I’ll still be supervising your labour and the birth.’ – ‘Oh, that’s nice.’ Then they’re very happy. Or that we’ll visit them in the first week after giving birth. They don’t always know that we’ll come along to their home and do some checkups. They think, ‘It all ends with the birth and then the maternity care assistant takes over, and I won’t see the midwife anymore’. And when we tell them after the birth that we’ll see them tomorrow, they think: ‘Tomorrow?’ And that’s apparently something else they don’t know. We do tend to assume they know, but it’s not always the case. (R10)
The impact of socioeconomic status. The midwives indicated that they encountered socioeconomic problems among native Dutch clients as well as non-western clients. However, a few midwives did state that they encountered these issues more frequently among non-western clients in their working region. Some difficulties concerned midwifery care directly, e.g. not being able to buy the necessities for the delivery and the baby, lack of transportation options to the midwifery practice or the hospital in the case of a short-stay hospital delivery or lack of prepaid credit to telephone the midwife in the event of an emergency. Other problems influenced midwifery care more indirectly, such as debts or domestic violence. These situations often require other services such as maternity care assistance and social work to be informed and sometimes collaborated with.
If you are working here in XXX, and you go to native Dutch family with two incomes, you’ll find nappies in different colours. If you go to immigrant families [...] She was having a home birth, and was from Suriname I think. She was here illegally; it was her fifth child,
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