Maternal Health

As a preventive medicine resident, you will have plenty of opportunities during this rotation to develop essential evaluation skills for pregnant patients and newborns. You will learn strategies to effectively work alongside ancillary staff — like doulas, counselors, lactation consultants, labor nurses, sonographers, social workers and health care managers — to provide optimal care.

This rotation will also provide you with a deep understanding of the medical and psychosocial needs of women and children, and it will enable you to offer appropriate psychosocial support.

You will sharpen your skills in performing physical exams, and our training will empower you to:

• conduct interviews to accurately assess and understand patients’ history of illness
• better understand social determinants of health and integrate them into history taking 

Working with faculty and patients, you will gain familiarity with procedures including:

• clinical breast exam
• vaginal delivery
• ultrasound during pregnancy
• cesarean sections
• cervical dilation assessment
• doula involvement in labor and delivery
• fetal monitoring
• pap smears

You will also gain awareness and knowledge of indications and contraindications for newborn procedures such as:

• circumcision
• phlebotomy and heel stick
• routine immunizations

It’s important you become adept at analyzing clinical data and considering patient input when making medical decisions. Therefore, we will acquaint you with:

• reviewing social determinants of health and designing plans to address various barriers
• selecting appropriate referrals to address identified barriers to optimal health, including referral to social workers, case managers, community health workers, mental health providers and addiction medicine specialists
• developing plans of action that attend to pertinent medical and psychosocial needs of patients 

We’ll also build your confidence in counseling patients on:

• prenatal nutrition
• birth plans and doula services
• expectations during pregnancy, labor and delivery
• newborn safety and breastfeeding
• domestic violence
• postpartum depression or psychosis
• types of routine newborn, pediatric and obstetrical screening tests

Moreover, you will learn the indications for activating child protective services investigations and gain experience providing timely consultations and referrals within the system, as indicated.

You’ll benefit from training within a regional women and children’s hospital when you gain inpatient experience with a family medicine obstetrics and newborn service. Here, our seasoned faculty will instruct you on common acute neonatal conditions in the hospital setting.

This is also the location where you will deepen your knowledge of performing normal newborn examinations.

Further, in our program, you’ll train within a health center that provides holistic care for underserved and marginalized communities — and it’s there where you’ll gain experience with outpatient prenatal visits and prenatal ultrasounds. 

We also enable you to participate with the Priscilla Project, a community outreach program that empowers socially isolated, at-risk women as they go through pregnancy, labor and delivery.

Working in these settings will enhance your understanding of the normal labor and delivery process; train you on when to obtain obstetric consultation; recognize of the risks, indications and contraindications for induction and augmentation of labor; and build your skills in managing a range of maternal health issues.

An added benefit of these training sites is that they will furnish you with experience using electronic and established resources to provide justification for management decisions.

We will ask you to complete a quality improvement (QI) project during this rotation.

This project should identify and address barriers to improve maternal and fetal health. 

Participate in the rotation for three months during your first or second year. 

This rotation can be longitudinal to have a broader impact on your quality improvement project.

This rotation takes place in urban and rural settings:

This rotation is overseen by: