Maternity Continuity Clinic

Within the last 10 years, the focus of service in outpatient departments and clinics of hospitals has changed from dispensing first aid to giving ambulatory care. As a result, the ambulatory care department is now the most dynamic change-oriented department in many hospitals. As part of this change, nursing service in the ambulatory care setting has discarded the managerial role and replaced it with a carecentered, more independent role in which nurses are expanding their functions of educating patients, providing supportive guidance, and making observations. In this role, the professional nurse becomes the health professional who is the one primarily responsible for delivery of health care to a specific patient population( 1,2,3). One such change resulted from an experiment in nursing at University Hospitals of Cleveland when nursing clinical directors examined areas within their services in which the nurse's role could be expanded in this way(4,5). A comprehensive health care program for pregnant women was b gun with professional nurses providing comprehensive health supervision and care to women who were