1.3 How does Conflict Impact Maternity Care?

When teams depend on contributions from multiple primary care providers, the potential for conflict is amplified—the result being poor team functioning, decreased team effectiveness, and impact on patient care (7-9). In the context of primary healthcare, including maternity care, we see conflict manifesting in serious deficits in human health resources (10).

Conflict threatens person-centered decision making, effective communication, teamwork, and collaboration, and can destabilize any or all four of these key components of interprofessional work at any time with serious consequences for patients, healthcare teams, care centers, and healthcare systems. Conflict can and does have a negative impact on healthcare outcomes and people’s experience of maternity care (9, 11-13). Poor collaboration among care providers leads to serious consequences for childbearing women, including higher rates of perinatal adverse outcomes. Interprofessional collaboration is therefore crucial to safe and high-quality maternity care (14).

Patients face a number of barriers to engaging in person-centered decision making in maternity care. For example, they may be unfamiliar with the healthcare system, have limited language and health literacy skills, or lack trust due to fragmented care experiences (14). Interprofessional collaboration is especially important when health problems arise during a pregnancy that require more coordination of care, such as during transfer of birth place (15) or change of primary provider.