FROM: Mena Steele, community midwife
SUBJECT: Increased workloads, falling numbers: what’s happening to community midwifery?
EMAIL:
mac.steele@tiscali.co.uk
Dear editor
I am a community midwife employed by a large teaching hospital in the North East. In our area, as well as in many areas I’m sure, the workload of community midwives has changed dramatically in the last ten years. This is due to the early discharge of women from hospital, more awareness of child protection issues, increase in birth rate and home births, as well as an increasing migrant population requiring the use of interpreters for many visits.
While the workload has increased, the number of community midwives has decreased. Community midwives in our area do on average three to four on-calls a month – this is to cover home births. There are no real guidelines for how long we can be out for a home birth, custom and practise is that midwives will stay until the baby is safely delivered, then go to the hospital to complete the notification for example – this could be anything from three to 12 hours, and this could be after a full shift on community. In the last few years, community midwives have increasingly been called into the delivery suite to fill staff shortfalls/help deal with increased workload, again normally following a full shift in community. Doing this and following working time directives obviously has the knock on effect of leaving shortfalls in the community.
I would like to enquire if any other hospitals have guidelines on this and how other midwives in the community manage. Our community manager is very supportive and wants to look at this situation within the existing resources. The obvious one would be to increase the number of community midwives, but this is extremely unlikely to happen.
