Living Memories

This section of The Masterful Midwife for this edition is dedicated to finding ways to prevent a skills deficit in midwifery. I suggest a demise in skills and midwifery craft knowledge is imminent due to:

• Increasing numbers of senior NHS midwives taking early retirement (NMC Leavers Survey 2024) exacerbated by attrition of midwives of all grades, due to stress, burnout and poor working conditions. Many take their unrecorded knowledge and skills with them, leading to ‘lost skills’ (McCourt et al 2014).
• Some skills, for example, physiological breech, are at risk of becoming ‘extinct’ (Nel & Geraghty 2018).
• A 43% Caesarean section rate in some NHS maternity units (NHS Digital 2024) and increased technology in clinical settings.

To preserve senior midwives’ living memories and to document midwives’ knowledge, an oral history of senior midwives’ craft knowledge and skills before they retire is being conducted. The methodology used is salvage ethnography. The purpose is to record and ‘salvage’ the skilled embodied knowledge of experienced practitioners on film before the skills are permanently lost.

Following ethical approval, a pilot study was conducted and involved filming a sample of retiring midwives performing their signature skills in a university simulation suite. Filming by BA film students was followed by biographical narrative interviews. Each interview was also filmed, and the data were analysed using a typology of craft knowledge (Titchen & Ersser 2001).

To disseminate the results, a poster was presented at the International Confederation of Midwives in Bali (2023) and a digital version of this can be found below. Funding is being sought to scale up the study to continue to capture the living memories of senior midwives for education and training of future generations.

The background and review of the literature for this salvage ethnography involved examining case notes and diaries of eighteenth-century midwives and doctors. How has non-formal, midwifery craft knowledge been recorded and passed on through the centuries? I’m delighted to say that this question will be addressed in the Living Memories section of future editions of The Masterful Midwife.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me if you’re interested in collaborating in this area of work or would just like more information and references.