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About Midwives

Brief history of midwifery
The word ‘midwife’ is derived from an early anglo saxon word ‘mit-wif’ which translates as ‘with woman’.  The role of midwives has traditionally been a woman knowledgeable about delivering babies who attended a woman at home.  In the 19th Century the role of doctors expanded and they started attending maternity homes, where midwives alone had been caring for women.  The death rate from puerperal fever increased dramatically as doctors performed autopsies on dead women in the morning and then went into the maternity hospitals in the afternoon. 

Over the past two hundred years hospitals and healthcare have improved dramatically.  Understanding about cleanliness, the spread of disease, the importance of ‘caring’ for people have all led to the remarkable capabilities of the current health service.   Once the caesarean-section operation was invented, childbirth became a significantly safer process for mothers and babies in need of assistance.  Alongside this development has also been an improvement in the population’s diet and living conditions so that mothers do not have to contend with undernourished bones and bodies and babies do not have to contend with dangerously dirty birthing conditions. 

As hospitals and medical knowledge advanced so did technological inventions, drug developments and protocols that suited medical practitioners.  Improved knowledge, skill and with the assistance of modern technology, complications were picked up sooner and became treatable, mortality rates fell and hospitals became synonymous with improving the safety of childbirth.

The healthcare environment changed to become finance driven and then the ‘claims culture’ emerged which has had a major impact on the increased medicalisation of maternity care.   Women became ‘patients’ and pregnancy and childbirth became a medical issue to be ‘treated’ in a hospital environment. 

Knowledge of maternity care has continued developing and the modern desire to take maternity care back into the community is built on hundreds of years of knowledge and experience from community and hospital care.  Medical intervention is now known to have long term health implications for mothers and their children.  Whilst remaining a life enhancing and life saving service for those that need it, modern medical care is not the only or best service for all women. 

This means that community midwifery, though still relying on the traditionally important ethos of being ‘with woman’ also operates with the knowledge of specialist manoeuvres to help deliver a baby in a difficult position, specialist equipment and carefully developed midwifery rules and regulations ensuring women receive safe care from a trained professional.  Abnormal situations are picked up earlier with greater accuracy and can be dealt with very successfully which shows the important combination of good midwifery care and good medical care. 

Midwives have some of the most rigorous statutory supervision requirements and Continuous Professional Development (CPD) requirements of all the healthcare professions.  A number of qualifications over and above the normal midwifery training have been identified to benefit midwives working in stand alone birth centres. 

It should be remembered that the best form of training for a midwife is to practice midwifery, working with women and seeing normal pregnancy and birth as much as possible.  This means a midwife is best qualified to spot ‘abnormal’ at an early stage and refer the woman for appropriate treatment. 

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