About Birth Emergency Skills Training®
Birth Emergency Skills Training® began in 2006 as a vision. What if I could help make birth safer by bringing birth emergency training to community midwives? That vision involved into a compelling book and three dynamic workshops.
Bonnie Gruenberg began her career as a CNM in 2003 after graduating from the University of Pennsylvania on a National Health Service Corps scholarship. Her experience attending births in both home and hospital showed her that the safest health systems linked knowledgeable community midwives with supportive hospital personnel able to provide compassionate, expert intervention when needed. Birth Emergency Skills training arose to cultivate expertise in that crucial interface between midwifery and medicine. Bonnie's commitment to teaching providers to administer emergency care germinated in the years she worked as an urban paramedic and trained EMS providers in her home state of Connecticut. After she became a midwife, she published Essentials of Prehospital Maternity Care (Prentice Hall, 2005) for EMS professionals, then deliberated how best she could benefit the midwifery community. In 2007, she developed and taught a childbirth emergency class for Aviva Midwifery Institute. Seeing the need for an evidence-based, midwife-friendly textbook on the topic, she wrote Birth Emergency Skills Training for Out-of-hospital Midwives, which was published in 2008. Shortly after hitting the shelves, it garnered several awards and honorable mentions including
In 2010, Andrea Dixon and Bonnie Gruenberg were speaking at the same midwifery event and brainstormed a birth emergency skills hands-on course based on the book. Andrea ran with the idea and the Birth Emergency Skills Training® Live Workshop was conceived. In the years that followed, we issued more than 1500 BEST Certificates in 31 different states, as well as Canada and Puerto Rico. Avril Bowens joined the team as an instructor, then brought her considerable intelligence and resourcefulness to transforming BEST into an online workshop. With COVID-19 precautions limiting the size and duration of gatherings, . Avril and Andrea developed BEST Online that can be taken as a free-standing course or as part of hybrid workshop with the didactics online and live participation reduced to a single day. Our next goal is to develop a more comprehensive online-only Birth Emergency Skills Training course which covers other important complications described in the upcoming second edition of the book. How does the presentation of appendicitis differ from that of round ligament pain or abruption in a pregnant person with abdominal pain? What does it mean when a birth center client develops postpartum subcutaneous emphysema? A culture of safety also emphasizes midwife self-care, and Birth Emergency Skills Training second edition addresses this important consideration. We are also developing modules that would allow participants to pick and choose topics of their choosing for CE credit. Through the years BEST keeps getting better. Thank you for your patronage, and we hope to see you again and again in the years to come. May your hands be blessed Bonnie, Andrea and Avril |