Group Prenatal Care and Meaning to Mothers

In 2010, ACNM published a position paper supporting group prenatal care which states that “group prenatal care offers an evidence-based model of prenatal care that can improve health outcomes for childbearing women and their infants.” Combining prenatal care and childbirth education into one setting has garnered increased attention in recent years, adding to the growing literature on alternative models of prenatal care beyond the 2.0 model.  For example, the CenteringPregnancy model has been examined in both quantitative and qualitative literature (Rising, 1998; Rising, Kennedy, & Klima, 2004; Rising & Jolivet, 2009), providing researchers insight into the standards of care, outcomes, and patient satisfaction.
  
In the recent phenomenological study Getting more than they realized they needed: a qualitative study of women’s experience of group prenatal care (McNeil, Vekved, Dolan, Siever, Horn, & Tough, 2012), researchers sought to “understand the central meaning of the experience of group prenatal care for women who participated in CenteringPregnancy.” While previous qualitative studies have generated insight as to the experience of group prenatal care for women (Kennedy, et al., 2009; Novick et al., 2011), this current study is the first to explore the meaning of the experience.