The Benefits of Working with a Doula Team
Picking and hiring a doula to be with you through your pregnancy and birth journey is a hugely personal decision. When interviewing potential doulas, you want to feel like you connect with them on both a professional and personal level! So, it’s understandable that some families can be hesitant to jump into working with a doula team (that swaps call) over an individual doula.
As the owner of The Bloc, I personally take this concern very seriously and do my best to build a cohesive team that not only have similar professional values and skills, but also have similar personalities to each other. This way, even if you don’t get to meet the doula who attends your birth, you can hopefully feel like you already know the vibes they’ll bring to your birth space!
While the caveats to working with a doula team are obvious, what is less obvious is the clear benefits having a team model provides to our clients. I worked for three years as a solo practice doula before launching our business’s doula team, and after six months of piloting the program I wanted to share the very clear client benefits I have seen by working under a team model of care.
No more stress about vacations, sickness, schedule conflicts etc.
I can’t tell you the level of anxiety that would consume me when I had to go to a family member’s baby shower that was out of town, or I had a client overdue and one of my children woke up puking. On one end, as doulas, we should not be expected to discard our whole life for a job; and on the other end, we never want to disappoint someone who is relying on us for support on the biggest day of their life.
Even though I never ended up having to use a back-up doula during my three years as a solo practice, I knew every time I had to have a discussion with a client about these circumstances, it would bring up a lot of anxiety for them when they had to wrap their mind around the possibility of a doula they never met being at their birth.
Now, with an on-call team model, I am able to schedule myself off when I have conflicts and have another doula on the schedule for those days. Additionally, if I am on call and have unexpected life circumstances arise (hello stomach bug season), a doula who they got to know, and were expecting to potentially be at their birth, can back me up and be there for them. While this obviously provides benefits to us as doulas, I’ve also seen it have huge client benefits.
The end of pregnancy stress is enough without having to add in your doula’s schedules or circumstances into the equation! With multiple doulas on our team, we can guarantee someone will be there to support your birth with excitement and joy, and not be worrying about what is going on back at their home.
Multiple levels of expertise and experiences
Even as the most experienced doula on our team, I constantly find myself messaging our doula group chat asking, “what am I missing here??” Often times during births there can be unexpected complications, and sometimes I feel like I’ve tried everything and still can’t get my client comfortable, or their labor to progress. Having multiple minds all problem solving in those instances are integral to our client’s experience!
I often tell clients… even if you end up only working with one of our doulas for your support, you still benefited from a doula team. We are constantly checking in with each other and making sure we are all providing top notch care to each of our clients. We all have similar training but have read different books, have seen different births, and have absorbed different experiences, and therefore can be help our clients in many different ways!
Here’s an example of a recent client experience that benefitted greatly from working with a doula team…
I had a client I had worked with for her prenatal care and was on call for her birth. She had very strong desires for a low-intervention, spontaneous birth, but her water broke and labor never really started after. Her midwife gave her a certain amount of time to try and get labor started at home, and despite trying all the different things I could think of (spinning babies, movement, resting, nipple stimulation, etc.) labor was nowhere near where she needed to be to avoid an induction. We were running up against the clock and I reached out to my doula team asking, “Is there anything I’m missing here??” One of the doulas asked if she would be open to acupuncture. Our client was up for anything, so I contacted a local bodyworker and acupuncturist, got her in for an asap appointment, and she started contracting on the table right after the acupuncture! She avoided an induction and had her baby just a few hours later without the use of any medication.
Getting to work with more experienced and balanced doulas
New reports show that doulas are burning out and leaving the field at excessively high rates. This means that doulas have more experience that can aid our communities, are no longer attending births due to the high demand and emotional stress of the job. What a disservice that is to birthing families!
I personally felt like the two-year mark was both the moment that I felt overwhelmed by the demand of my work schedule, and also where I felt extremely competent and experienced in my role as a doula. Nourishing and growing my doula team, and then switching to an on-call model of care, was integral to me being able to stay in the game and use my experience to keep serving families and meeting the needs of my community. Additionally, I have been able to bring doulas on to my team who are extremely good at their jobs and have values that align with our mission here at The Bloc (which is to support every different type of family and all different types of births!), who do not have the ability to do doula work as solo doulas do to childcare or spousal work schedule restrictions.
A team model of care has not only allowed us to continue using our expertise instead of switching to a different field of work but have also made us more balanced and joyful doulas. Getting to foster other areas of our life without constantly being on call, means we show up to your birth excited for this day and time with you, and not exhausted from attending the three back-to-back births that happened to all fall on the same week (only ever happens on full moons, ha!).
While these are the primary benefits we have seen directly affect our clients once we switched to a team-based model of care, we also totally understand hesitancy families might have when working with a doula team. Please check out our services for a breakdown of your doula package, and if you have interest in us supporting your birth, please fill out a contact form, and we will be happy to schedule a video chat with you to answer all of your questions and explain the ins and out of working with a doula team.
Happy Birthing!
