NHS guide to Careers in Midwifery - Keele University

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16 Careers in midwifery Future career options Your midwifery qualifications and experience will open a wide range of options to develop your career in the directions that interest you most. As your knowledge and expertise increase, you could move into more senior practitioner roles. Becoming a team or unit manager, you could combine responsibility for managing other staff with ongoing hands-on involvement with clients. You may choose to specialise in a particular area of perinatal care and study for further qualifications. As part of this process you might carry out research that helps move the profession forward. You could become attached to a university and be involved in teaching future midwives. If you stay in practice, you could consider the role of consultant midwife, which provides clinical leadership for midwives and others across maternity services. Your career could well move through different elements of research, teaching, practice development and management — including management at board level within an NHS Trust, influencing the shape of healthcare across a whole community. You could also move into other professions, including neonatal nursing or health visiting. Neonatal nurses have a clinical focus on the treatment and care of women and babies with health complications around birth: for example, helping premature babies to get through the critical first few days after they are born. Health visitors work with families at home and in the community, promoting good health with particular attention on young children. In effect, they take over where the community midwife’s role ends, and have a wider concern with the circumstances in which a young child is growing up. For information about the qualifications needed to work in nursing, visit www.nhscareers.nhs.uk/list/qualifications
telephone 0845 60 60 655 email advice@nhscareers.nhs.uk Careers in midwifery 17 CASE STUDY Name: Jamie Richardson Job title: consultant midwife, Whipps Cross University Hospital NHS Trust, east London Entry route: after working as a registered nurse While training to become a nurse, Jamie chose placements in gynaecology and maternity. He worked as a general nurse for 18 months and then applied to Greenwich University to do a diploma in midwifery. I really enjoyed working in maternity and knew then that I would end up in a role where I could have varied experience – midwifery attracted me. My first qualified post was at the Royal London Hospital. I was there for six years and during that time I was supported while doing further courses. I did my bachelor’s degree and master’s degree in midwifery, followed by a master’s in teaching. Leading up to this current role, I was very well supported and encouraged. Primarily, the consultant midwife role is a leadership role, and one of the main things I have done was open an in-hospital birth centre in May 2006. There are five rooms in the birth unit, aiming for 300 births a year. On a day-to-day basis, I might work in the birth centre in a clinical capacity, which would involve looking after women in labour. I’m also a qualified neonatal examiner and run regular training sessions including foetal monitoring and water births. On top of this there are clinical leadership duties, which involve discussing guidelines, clinical improvement, and rewriting the university’s 18-month and three-year programmes. From my experience, if you have drive, the opportunities are there – you have to go for it. You have to be a team player – this is really important, whether you are in the community or on a ward. You have to be prepared for the unexpected because, in some ways we are like a mini A&E. It’s not an easy job but as long as you remember why you are here – for the mothers and their babies – it keeps you going. And you have got to have a really good sense of humour. If I see that on an application form, it impresses me.
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