Drive for more midwives from diverse communities

A new campaign is being launched in Wales to recruit more midwives from diverse communities.

Professor Sheila Hunt is behind the drive, which aims to have a midwife workforce to ‘mirror the local population’.

Professor Hunt, head of Cardiff University's school of midwifery, is launching the Nursing Careers for All project next month (September).

She said the aim of the campaign is to ‘engage closely with a variety of community groups’ and improve access to higher education in deprived areas.‘Students from diverse communities are currently in the minority,’ she said.

‘This is often because they have not made the right choices at GCSE level or they think midwifery is not open to them.’

Professor Hunt stressed that the project will not specifically target members of ethnic minorities, but will focus on ‘Communities First’ areas where the proportion of people from those communities is likely to be higher.

Of the 1560 midwives in Wales, only 0.4% are mixed race, black or black British, and 0.2% are Asian or Asian British.

Statistics from the Office for National Statistics, released in May this year, show that between 2001 and 2009, the percentage of people in Wales from minority ethnic groups increased from 2.1% to 4.1%.

Helen Rogers, director of the RCM Board for Wales, said: ‘It's important to respect cultural beliefs and practices, no matter what they are.

‘There are lots of myths and misunderstandings. For example, health care in Poland is very different.

‘A midwife has more of a handmaiden role in Poland, so when they give Polish women advice, they don't see it as professional advice.

‘And in the Irish traveller community, when a woman has a baby the whole extended family descends to visit, which is difficult when there are visiting regulations of two visitors to a bed. We try to find a compromise.’

She added it was not essential to have a midwife from the same community.