Video in the Delivery Room

Video is used in more and more hospitals to support communication and professionalization. The video is used as an instrument for feedback, change and development.

In 5 minutes of film you see a fully “normal” delivery, recorded by a nurse in one of the delivery rooms of her hospital. Her image-by-image analysis shows a jungle of delivery room rituals and routines and a delivering woman-losing track. Good intentions can be noticed, but also constant disturbances of the emotional and important moments around a birth.

This first part of the film is then set against images of 3 deliveries at home and of a birth in a homelike delivery room at the School of Midwifery in Amsterdam. In these last cases you’ll find yourself taken along on the flow of a natural and undisturbed process. Emotional experiences of life, such as a birth and the subsequent contact with the newborn baby, have their own logic, which can be made visible by image-by-image video analysis.

15 minutes

Saskia van Rees