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Resources

• The ACNM Benchmarking Project: A Practical Guide to Participation
  Learn how to get started, what works in other midwifery practices, how to navigate common challenges, and what you get for participating in the project.
  
• Quality Management Handbook
  Developed by the Quality Management Section of the Division of Standards and Practice, this book provides a basic introduction to quality management, as well as detailed information regarding peer review, quality assurance, and quality improvement.Designed to address the needs of midwives in clinical practice, the book includes forms and documents that may be reproduced or altered to fit the needs of individual practices.The 2006 edition is currently available.
  
• Journal of Midwifery & Women's Health (JMWH)
  This article from JMWH details the ACNM Benchmarking Project and presents benchmarks for obstetric practice from the year 2004.
  
• The ABCs of Benchmarking (flash presentation)

• What's Your Data, Baby? How Midwives Can Change Health Care Delivery

  Midwives appreciate and utilize interventions when necessary, but many midwives are being pressured to use invasive and costly interventions when caring for women with low risk pregnancies. The basis for these pressures has less to do with optimal care and more to do with convenience, profit, and liability fears. How can midwives influence this process? Sharing collective midwifery data may be the key.
  

• Secrets of a Best Practice

  In this article from the fall 2011 issue of Quickening, Susan Fisher, CNM, describes how midwives at the Athens Regional Medical Center Midwifery Practice in Georgia gather their benchmarking data and achieved "best practice" status for their low 3^rd and 4^th degree laceration rates.