Vera and colleagues wish everyone peace, health, connection and laughter during the upcoming holiday season.
Welcome to Midwifery Care North Shore
Congratulations on your pregnancy! Vera and her colleagues at Midwifery Care North Shore (MCNS) understand that growing your family can give rise to ecstatic joy, disbelief, a multitude of questions and much else. Pregnancy, birth and early postpartum is a transitional time and we as midwives feel privileged to use our professional knowledge, skills and connections to accompany women and their families on this journey.
Every woman and every birth is different. The care at MCNS is intended to be a partnership that meets the individual needs of each pregnant woman so that she may have a healthy and safe pregnancy, birth and postpartum. This personalized service includes home and hospital birth, water birth, as well as breastfeeding and early parenting support. We believe in informed decision making and actively involving women in their care.
Our services are paid for by BC Medical Services Plan and supported by Lions Gate Hospital’s maternity unit for North Vancouver and West Vancouver residents; although we are also able to offer care to women living in Vancouver, Burnaby, Bowen Island and the Sea to Sky Corridor who are prepared to travel.
Midwife Vera Berard RN, RM, MA (Midwifery) and colleagues welcome you to explore our website and to connect with us via any of the contact options available. Clicking on the highlighted colored words will bring up additional information.
It is over a year and a half
It is over a year and a half since this website was created and I last posted. Life has been awesome! I am learning that while life’s curve-balls cannot be controlled, I can choose a coping attitude. Consequently, I am grateful to have work that I love and LGH hospital privilege that enable me to safely provide services in hospital, as well as in women’s homes in my community. Since 2013 when opportunity for other midwives to obtain hospital privilege was restricted, limiting my ability to attract a practice partner, I have appreciated journeying with over 86 women in a solo-midwife capacity. It is the partnership that I have established with women that has kept me enjoying midwifing. I am pleased to note that since I opened MCNS doors 17 years ago, over 847 women and their families have received midwifery services from Vera and her colleagues. While the limitation of midwifery hospital privileges continues to challenge my ability to establish a small group practice whose members all my clients can meet on a regular basis. I value the collegial homebirth and monthly off-call relief agreements that I have established with Andreia Situm from Babease, Aleka Stobo from Coast Midwifery, Grace Brinkman from On-the-drive midwives and others, as well as the team spirit around women and baby centred care that we have developed.
On a more personal level, I continue to embrace my connection to my community, as my smaller midwifery practice has offered me the opportunity to live ‘local’ with my work. I have always enjoyed walking my dog, Koda, born November 2001 and died June 2015. May he rest in peace!
Although I miss him much, I feel fortunate to have neighbors’ dogs that I can walk. I still enjoy cycling with my husband and have greatly appreciated the opportunity to walk or cycle to clients’ homes or Lions Gate Hospital. I persist in bumping into neighborhood mothers who introduce me to their children ranging from toddlers to teenagers as “the midwife who was with mum when I was pregnant and who received you as you were being born…” These encounters always remind me that it is the journey ‘with women and their families’ that I love.
