Guidelines for Employing a Doula

If you are not yet familiar with the concept of a doula, please look at our FAQs section in "About Doulas" before reading on.

At Doula UK we have many women who have come to be doulas through a variety of journeys, all are passionate about their work. The most important thing to consider when employing a doula is "Do I like this woman? Can I spend time with her? Can I trust her?"

You will find there are as many different doulas as there are people, there is not a typical doula. Feel free to ask around, interview several women (we suggest first by phone and then face-to-face). Ask a doula for references or for other doulas' details in your area. At the end of the day, you need to find the right doula for you.

If you are considering employing a birth or postnatal doula, we would like to encourage you to contact doulas directly via our website as it is a free resource. At the beginning of 2004, we introduced a "Recognition Process" for doulas in the UK where we have established a distinction between doulas who have simply registered with us as trainee doulas, and those who are recognised doulas. The trainee doulas that appear in our Find a Doula section have completed a Doula UK approved training course but they have not acquired the level of experience necessary for them to become fully recognised. This level of experience is normally four assessed births for birth doulas and four assessed postnatal jobs for postnatal doulas. Many trainee doulas have other forms of experience and other skills, so please don't discount them simply due to the fact that they are a trainee.

We are aware that you may be unsure of what to ask doulas to help determine whether they are right for you. With that in mind we have put together a list of sample questions on these pages.

You may choose to ask all these questions of the prospective doulas, or just a few. There are no right or wrong answers, we are just providing some guidelines for the types of things you may want to know before making your decision.

We have listed the questions directly on this website, but we have also reproduced them in Word and Adobe Acrobat so that they can be easily printed out, and, for ease of reference, with space provided for you to write notes about the individual doulas that you interview.

We hope that you will find this section of the website helpful.