To build the best maternity services you need the best educated and trained staff. To achieve this, it has long been recognised that key midwifery, nursing and medical staff need to be able to move between the NHS in service, and the world of teaching and research in Universities, keeping up to date, improving practice researching for change, translating that change into practice. A healthy two-way street.
But matching pay scales, payments and incomes is essential if professionals with families and commitments are to be able to plan careers or midwifery schools to recruit and retain the best staff for teaching and to support research.
The doctors, especially some of those at consultant level are virtually single condition or disease scientists, working on single areas of medicine, leading research but still practicing, operating, and turning research into practice. Over the years the medics have developed complicated pay, remuneration and recognition payments, built up to support this essential flow between practice, teaching and research in medicine wherever it takes place.
It’s not just the pay scales. There are now greater expectations that midwives who go into teaching should have doctorates and other higher education masters’ and teaching qualifications. Traditionally midwives in large numbers have gone over to teaching precisely because important numbers of them could combine it with working to get their PhDs and research in areas of their interest while teaching.
The Lancet Series on Midwifery in 2014 has led to an explosion of research into childbirth, maternity services, leading up and contributing to the WHO International Year of the Nurse and Midwife, focussing on maternal and child mortality and health improvement and the key impact of women’s access to midwifery services.
Now we have the UK Governments NHS Workforce plan, mapping out the expansion of education and training of nurses and midwives to meet future needs and overcome the current gap, estimated at 2300 – 3000 midwives.
Midwifery is behind the curve on this straddling the NHS and University pay scales. Leading midwives on education report problems recruiting and retaining key staff. Some estimate that when including NHS allowances the gap has grown to as much as £10,000 in what a midwife could lose in moving over to university pay scales. This is the gap that needs to be closed if the best is to be able to move freely between the NHS and Universities.
With the prospect of new midwives coming through apprenticeship routes this ability to combine teaching and practice will be even more to the front.
But we need to understand more about the gap. We are calling for evidence, cases and examples from practice, from individuals and institutions, about teaching or getting into research to set out the problems midwifery education and research are having.
You can submit anonymously and where we see patterns, we will highlight them. Please include issues from your family life – pay scales and payment systems are not gender neutral – and for many midwives making a move either way between the NHS and Universities or colleges is a complex juggling act of family and career. Which is as it should be as the majority of midwives are still women and policy that ignores this fact is stuck in the dark ages.
Meanwhile we will examine the official scales and look for points and payments that could be used to improve in the existing system.
Send us examples of the gap working in practice between the NHS and Universities
Send us case studies of problems recruiting or retains staff
Include pay but also any qualifications and experience recognition issues or research hurdles
Anonymise the information if you wish. We will not publish anything without individual permission
Send us the material to help us Close the Gap in Midwifery Education
We will collect case studies and present an interim report at the Maternity and Midwifery Forum Midwifery Education Conference this autumn, 25th October.
Submit your paper here or email [email protected].
Neil Stewart
Editorial Director
Maternity and Midwifery Forum