The International Confederation of Midwives have recently launched a new database that points globally to the work of midwives. Dr Jenny Hall, Editor for the Maternity and Midwifery forum explains what it contains and how it can be used.
Globally the work of midwives has often been hidden in health data and politically. The International Confederation of Midwives (ICM) has done something about this through the launch of the new Midwives Data hub, which is now live. Working with Direct relief, they have created an open access resource that points to the work that midwives are doing.
The data is collated from 50 global resources.
The ICM point out that the data it includes covers aspects such as:
“Maternal and newborn health outcomes and service coverage, midwifery workforce and models of care, the ICM Essential Competencies for Midwifery Practice, and the enabling—or non-enabling—environments and leadership structures that support the profession.”
The tool provides opportunity to:
- “Search and compare country-specific profiles
- Explore indicators on sexual and reproductive health
- Understand the national policy environment for midwives, midwifery workforce size, structure, and distribution
- Download the full datasets behind the indicators, along with other available data sources “
All this information is a resource for all midwives in clinical practice, research and education, along with students. It provides information that may be used for political leverage as they provide a toolkit to point to health outcomes in your country which may be compared with those of others. It can be used to ask questions as well as address local gaps in data.
I have had a look at the data this tool provides, and it is a powerful resource. It is accessible and relatively easy to use, with opportunity to delve much deeper for those who are undertaking research. A helpful video to is provided to show the steps for use and how to compare across countries. I was also pleased to see a tab of the different definitions that are used within the tables.
I took a look at the UK data and it was interesting and slightly disturbing reading, mainly for some of the data that is not available across our countries as well as the global rankings on some of the information. It covers aspects such as maternal and neonatal mortality, the rates and how this measures against global targets and trends, pointing to whether these are improving, static or getting worse. I note that some of the data may be slightly out of date to some national statistics, such as the Caesarean section rate is from 2021. I was concerned to see that there are some glaring omissions in our data, such as postnatal care coverage and breast-feeding data in particular. Also missing are the numbers of midwife-led units, the percentage of midwife educators who are midwives and a national policy of the distinct occupational group separate to nurses. The definition for this latter is:
Shows whether midwifery is formally recognised as a profession separate from nursing in national legislation or policy
The omission of this data is a bit surprising! This may be because of sources the data from which this has been extracted, or it may be that nationally we need to be better at sharing the information globally. It does mean that there should be an air of caution when considering what is presented and looking elsewhere as well as required.
It does also say that we are not meeting five out of seven competencies for the Scope of practice for BEmONC which is Basic Emergency Obstetric and Newborn Care. These come from the UNPFA guidelines. The expectation is that midwives should be able to provide aspects for managing emergencies during pregnancy, childbirth, and the postnatal period. These are:
- “administration of antibiotics,
- uterotonic drugs,
- anticonvulsants,
- manual removal of the placenta,
- removal of retained products,
- assisted vaginal delivery, and
- basic neonatal resuscitation.”
These aspects maybe something to reflect on in our scope of practice going forward.
Further it appears we do not meet the expectations for contraception with the expectation of being able to prescribe the:
- Contraceptive pill
- Contraceptive injection
- Contraceptive implant
- Intrauterine device (IUD)
- Emergency contraception (“morning after pill”)
Another aspect of the database is the ability to compare data across different countries, which is an interesting exercise, and a realisation that there is missing data for others as well. I also like how they have combined resources to produce helpful packages for mental health and trauma support, working in conflict and crisis zones, and extreme heat. I suspect there will be much more to come.
For those who are researchers and wish to deep dive into the data there is a link to all the resources as well. I can see how this hub will be an amazing tool for those in every country to support research and changing policy.
Dr Jenny Hall
July 2025