The Midwife Takes Center Stage in the Global Arena in 2005: The International Confederation of Midwives (ICM) (original) (raw)
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An agenda for midwifery education: Advancing the state of the world׳s midwifery
Authors of the Lancet series on midwifery (Homer et al., 2014; Renfrew et al., 2014; ten Hoope-Bender et al., 2014; Van Lerberghe et al., 2014) recently illuminated the considerable body of evidence showing that midwives can make a difference to the lives of women and newborns. Midwifery practice has contributed to reductions in maternal and infant mortality and midwives are essential in achieving high quality maternal and neonatal care in all settings in all countries. To date, midwives have played a key role towards the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, and inevitably their involvement will be necessary in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), such as SDG 3 (United Nations Development Programme, 2015), which includes targets for further reductions in maternal and neonatal mortality.
Knowledge and use of the ICM global standards for midwifery education
Midwifery, 2019
Objective: To explore how the International Confederation of Midwives Global Standards for Midwifery Education are currently used and their influence, if any, on the development of education programs globally. Secondarily, to identify current challenges to midwifery education. Design: Cross-sectional exploratory descriptive qualitative study using focus groups and one-on-one interviews to collect data about knowledge of and use of the Education Standards and participants perceived current challenges to midwifery education. Interviews conducted in English, Spanish, and French. Setting and Participants: Midwife educators, education directors, or regulators attending one of four national/international conferences or one-on-one interviews in person or via internet. Thematic analysis was employed using the Framework approach for data analysis. Findings: There were 11 focus groups and 19 individual interviews involving 145 midwives from 61 countries. There was a general awareness of the Education Standards amongst the participants although knowledge about the specifics of the document was lacking. The Standards were mainly used as a reference and greater use was made when developing new educational programs. The Standards identified as most difficult to meet included: organization and administration of the program, ensuring that teachers were formally prepared as teachers, meeting targets for teacher to student ratios and that 50% of educational time took place in the clinical setting. Universally endorsed challenges to midwifery education were: 1) inability to accommodate the increase in curricular content without compromising prior content or lengthening programs; 2) insufficient resources including lack of classroom and clinical teachers; 3) medicalization of childbirth and health system changes limiting student exposure to the midwifery care model; 4) role conflict and competition for clinical experience with other health professionals. Key Conclusions: The Education Standards need to be more widely disseminated and implemented. Stronger collaborations with clinical settings and government systems are required to solve the current challenges to midwifery education. Implication of Practice: Well-educated midwives can provide the majority of maternal and neonatal care, however it will require an investment in strengthening midwifery programs globally for this goal to be achieved.
The state of the world's midwifery: Making the invisible visible
International Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics, 2012
This paper presents the evidence for maternal and newborn mortality and morbidity, and provides the background to the publication of the groundbreaking Global State of the World's Midwifery Report (SoWMy) in 2011. Supported by 30 agencies, the SoWMy provides data gathered from 58 countries on their maternity services, and makes recommendations for improving the care of and services for childbearing women by improving the status, education, and regulation of midwives globally. If governments, policy makers, professional associations, international organizations, donor agencies, and civil society take the recommended steps and invest accordingly, this will effectively lead to an improvement in access to quality midwifery services and maternal and newborn health globally.
Title: Barriers to Midwifery: An International Perspective
Research consistently demonstrates that midwives offer effective care. Not only is midwife care less expensive than physician care, midwives are often able to establish a rapport with clients that translates into better perinatal health for mothers and babies. Given its effectiveness and efficiency, it is odd that the practice of midwifery is still limited in many places in the world. In some places midwives face legal restrictions; in other places midwives are limited by the nature of medical practice or by other cultural and social factors. When attempting to improve primary care in obstetrics, one must understand the barriers faced by midwives. Although there exist several social scientific accounts of midwives, no one has collated these works in a way that allows us to see reasons for the great variation in the practices of midwives. The purpose of this paper is to provide an analysis of the social situation of midwives. To that end, how the different approaches to midwifery evolved (and are evolving) are explored. The effects of different organizational structures and how different cultures influence midwives' niches in the health care system, the way midwives view their profession, how midwives do their work, and how midwives are viewed by others are also examined. DESCRIPTIONS OF MIDWIFERY around the world are provided by anthropologists, sociologists, and others. To compare these accounts is to be struck by the great diversity in the status of midwives. While midwives in different cultures share the common tasks of assisting at birth and caring for the health of women, they do not share a common status. In some cultures people genuflect and kiss the hand of a midwife when she passes [ 1]; in other places midwives are seen as "polluted" [ 2]; in still other cultures midwives are accorded the middling status of "semiprofessional." These accounts also reveal a wide diversity in recruitment, training, styles of practice, the midwife's place in the community and in the medical system, and the rewards of practice. If midwives were organized along a continuum, with those who use all the tools of modern technology at one end and those who are nontechnological in orientation at the other, those on the extreme ends of the continuum would not recogn ize each other as
Midwifery, 2018
In 2015, the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM) launched the Midwifery Services Framework (MSF): an evidence-based tool to guide countries through the process of improving their sexual, reproductive, maternal and newborn health services through strengthening and developing the midwifery workforce. The MSF is aligned with key global architecture for sexual, reproductive, maternal and newborn health and human resources for health. This third in a series of three papers describes the experience of starting to implement the MSF in the first six countries that requested ICM support to adopt the tool, and the lessons learned during these early stages of implementation. The early adopting countries selected a variety of priority work areas, but nearly all highlighted the importance of improving the attractiveness of midwifery as a career so as to improve attraction and retention, and several saw the need for improvements to midwifery regulation, pre-service education, availabili...