The Masterful Midwife website is here to support midwives’ collective knowledge exchange and legacy
The Masterful Midwife
The Masterful Midwife is an interactive bi-monthly electronic journal and blog. In essence, the focus of this website is on the senior midwifery workforce. It’s a virtual space for midwives to collectively share their knowledge, expertise, stories, clinical skills and living memories. The purpose is to celebrate our professional legacy and skillset, finding creative, dynamic ways to optimise knowledge exchange and potentially improve maternity care.
Photo by Magdalena Smolarska
Cascading knowledge to the next generations of midwives is essential, particularly in light of the perfect storm created by attrition of the midwifery workforce due to stress, burnout, poor working conditions and early retirement (NMC 2024). The Masterful Midwife is therefore a platform to serve as a reference point for reflecting intelligently on the maternity service and co-creating solution-focused change. Midwives at all levels, as well as learners, apprentices and other frontline health professionals providing maternity care are warmly invited to collaborate.
Each edition will centre on a theme and will include a Guest Blog from an inspirational midwife. This month, Amity Reed describes how deeply burnout affected her professional and personal life.
Masterful Midwife restorative retreats are planned with the intention of helping midwives to decompress through wellness workshops using sound healing and treatments such as massage. The retreats will also include a collage mapping activity, a resilience exercise and a legacy skills circle.
A CALL TO ACTION to urgently improve postnatal care is presented in the About section of this edition.
We’re only just launching this website and we will be adding new content in due course. To stay up-to-date and stay in touch please complete the form below so we can keep you informed. Thanks!
Gina
Latest News
We’ve made a start putting together stories and information in our Blog and Latest News section:
Guest Blog on Burnout
I had the pleasure of meeting Amity while she was studying for a BSc midwifery degree in London. As a senior midwifery lecturer at the time, I noticed Amity’s passion for midwifery and was sure she would become an excellent midwife. The classification of...
The Birth of a Book by Anna Kent
I started keeping a diary aged 10, describing my day or what food I’d eaten. Later, during my teen years, my writing would pendulate dramatically between the shock and confusion surrounding the Iraq War – to which boy I hoped to snog at the school disco. Writing...