This page provides an overview of the role of the RCM and the role of midwives today; it also sets out the kind of world-class maternity services we want to see.
Elsewhere on our website you can find a wealth of news, views, briefings, and information about events. You can also locate information about our professional, membership, employment relations and international activities.
More details can also be found about the following by clicking on the links:
A WORLD-CLASS MATERNITY SERVICE
The Royal College of Midwives wants the very best for the women for whom midwives care, their children and families.
That means a world-class maternity service. And the RCM supports the Government's promise – set out in its General Election manifesto – that by 2009 all women will enjoy a full range of choices over where and how they give birth, including the choice of a home birth, and that all women will have one-to-one care from the same midwife throughout pregnancy. That is what every woman deserves.
But the national shortage of midwives means very real action must be taken now to recruit more midwives. We need also to retain the ones we have. Without substantially more midwives in the NHS the aspiration of a world-class maternity service for Britain will remain just that… an aspiration, and not a reality.
Most importantly of all is the need to support student midwives. These are the midwives of tomorrow and they need better financial support and a job upon qualification. Without this, maternity services will not get the additional midwives that are so urgently needed.
THE ROLE OF THE MIDWIFE
There are almost three-quarters of a million births in the UK each year, and midwives are the lead professional at two-thirds of all of them. The midwife is the expert in normal birth – the type of birth that most women have.
The midwife's role is much more than just caring for a woman during her labour however, as vitally important as that time is. The midwife cares for a woman throughout the antenatal period and in the first few days and weeks of the newborn's life.
The midwife can offer advice, assistance and guidance to all women, focussed on a woman's individual needs. After the birth, the midwife can help to promote breastfeeding.
Midwives are committed to developing a woman-centred maternity service providing a vital contribution to public health and an essential investment in the wellbeing of tomorrow's citizens.
It is in childhood that the foundations of a lifetime of good health can be laid. It is during pregnancy, childbirth and in those precious days and weeks at the beginning of a life that the earliest and most important building blocks are laid. And it is the midwife who plays a crucial role at that all-important time.
