Expert comment Last updated 29 March 2018
Alison Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Midwifery at Birmingham City University and a former NHS Midwife.
The NHS has announced plans to create a further 3,000 places on midwifery training courses over the next four years as part of its aims to meet staffing demands. This only addresses part of the problem moving forwards.
It isn’t as simple as recruiting thousands more students to support the average number of patients, there needs to be the infrastructure in place to support this idea. Universities will need more tutors, more on site resources and perhaps most importantly, more mentors and capacity in placement areas – which currently is under immense strain. Not only that, currently numbers of applicants for nursing and midwifery courses are being put off by lack of funding now that loans have replaced bursaries and we have seen a drop in applicants ever since.
Regarding having a named midwife, this has been on the cards in every maternity report since 1993 when the Changing Childbirth report came out from Baroness Cumberlege.
Whilst small pockets of midwives do run this form of midwifery, to expect every midwife to be on call 24/7 for nine months is not really practical or feasible.
It is a lovely way to provide care but is it realistic or achievable? You could argue no for the masses, especially when the ratio of cases to midwives is so high and the complexity of childbirth now.