Midwife

Midwives provide care and support women and their families while pregnant, throughout labour and during the period after a baby’s birth.

Midwife

Working life

You’ll mainly deal with pregnant women requiring professional support and advice. You are likely to be the lead health professional and contact for a woman, providing evidence-based information and helping her make informed choices about the options and services available throughout her pregnancy.

Roles and Duties

All women will need you to understand the emotional, physical and psychological processes of pregnancy and birth. Sometimes pregnancies do not go to plan and you will need to offer support and advice on stillbirth, miscarriage, termination, neonatal death and neonatal abnormalities.

If you are working as a community midwife, you are likely to develop good professional relationships with your families, which can make counselling easier at difficult times.

You’ll often work on a rota and be on-call to provide 24-hour care at the woman’s home as well as in hospital.

Where will I work?

Midwifery services are increasingly moving from hospitals to the community, so where you work could reflect this.

Antenatal care in the community is provided in women’s homes, local clinics, children’s centres and GP surgeries. It can also be provided in hospitals where you may work in triage and assessment areas, high and low risk labour, postnatal wards and neonatal units. Care during labour is provided in a mother’s home, as well as midwifery led maternity units.

You’ll work with a range of other professionals including gynaecologists, GPs, health visitors, neonatal nurses and maternity support workers.

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You’ll be the expert on childbirth and your responsibilities are likely to be diverse. You’ll provide:

provide full antenatal care, including parenting classes, clinical examinations and screening
identify high-risk pregnancies
monitor women and support them during labour and the birthing process
teach new and expectant mothers how to feed, care for and bathe their babies
You could be working with women from a variety of backgrounds and you will need to be confident enough to communicate with different people. Some women and their families might be homeless, socially excluded, have disabilities or be very young. Other clients may be from certain cultural or religious backgrounds.

Midwife

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