Introduction: Perinatal care changed throughout history. The key changes were made after World War II, when childbirth was moved out of the domestic environment into maternity hospitals. This when childbirth became medicalised, but today a more humanized approach is strived to. A continuative treatment and the constant presence of a midwife during childbirth are elements of such a delivery. The midwife is the leading expert in monitoring low-risk pregnancies of expectant mothers, birthing mothers and neonatal mothers. Besides knowledge, the midwife also needs many a personality trait, which enables him/her to establish an appropriate and partner relation. Objective: The objective of this work is to shortly present the development of midwifery in theory and then with the help of semi-structured interviews offer an in-depth insight in the individual experiences and evaluation of a midwife as a birth assistant, midwife natal care and to present the ideal midwife practices. The intention is to establish how the evaluation, the midwife ideals and the midwife practises changed with the interviewees of three different generations. Method: A descriptive method and qualitative research was applied. Semi-structured interviews were carried out. The research includes three women who have had a least one birthing experience, and delivered in the span of approximately twenty years, between the years 1950 and 2010, and are in a family relation. The collected results were analysed with a qualitative content analysis with the help of open coding and categorising. They were then compared and corroborated with foundings from other executed research. All literature was acquired with the help of the union catalogue database COBISS and from internet-based databases DiKUL, Science Direct, Cochrane Library and Google Scholar. Results: According to the opinions of the women, the midwife is the leading expert in natal care. Women who had the option of a continuative midwife natal care or at least knew the midwife during childbirth, are pleased with this, others wished for this option. All there interviewees expressed the wish for more involvement of the midwife during childbirth. Bestow their opinion, the midwife has to be kind, emphatic, communicative, has to have the appropriate knowledge and has to be able to establish a partner relation with the birthing mother. Discussion and conclusion: the criteria for evaluating the natal care were similar in all three women. They all had similar perinatal care. They also have a similar opinion on why they think the presence of the midwife during childbirth is important. Their ideal natal care is the continuity of midwifery care.
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