Blog post February

Finally after what feels like the longest January of my life, we can welcome February and with it hopefully a more productive stress free month than I’ve been having. 3rd year midwifery students are well into studying for both our OSCEs and our dissertation. For the majority of degrees in City’s School of Health Sciences, the 3rd year dissertation is actually a literature review on a topic of your choice related to your chosen degree. For this, you have to conduct a detailed service using an appropriate search platform to identify 6-10 research papers that are detailed around your chosen topic. After much deliberation and countless ideas and areas of interest, I have chosen to look at how a history of childhood sexual abuse affects the way women go on to experience maternity care in the future. Although an incredibly interesting and potentially practice-changing topic, the nature of the topic means that the research is pretty heavy going. Hearing about the experiences of people who have gone through these terrible life events although at times difficult, is vital to the profession as the better educated our medical workforce is in a traumatic area, the better they are able to support and communicate with victims as well as to understand how maternity care and other areas of medicine can be improved for this vulnerable group to reduce the likelihood of re-traumatisation whilst accessing medical care.

I am in the early stages of this process at the moment due to a delay in selecting my topic and am still reading through papers to find the most appropriate and useful pieces of research. Once I have these, I will explore the topic further with lots of background reading so that I am informed enough to analyse and evaluate these papers in order to get the most out of the research. Although only a piece of work for university, the implications for midwifery students conducting this research can be enormous – the way we practice as midwives is under constant scrutiny and is crucial in order for us to provide the best and safest care, and the dissertations we are working on at the moment armour us with the newest and most up to date research to take with us into our careers and spread around the workforce potentially changing the way we practice all together.

I have friends looking at the stigma surrounding HIV in pregnancy, ways to improve experiences for people with tokophobia (a fear of childbirth) and interventions to improve the outcomes for women accessing mental health services in pregnancies – all topics that I’m sure you agree will provide great research to encourage change to happen. One midwife on her own can arguably only make limited difference in her role but a cohort of nearly-qualified midwives all armed with the freshest and most successful research in a variety of areas can certainly make a significant start to make changes and challenge the way we work. The ultimate aim of any midwife is to provide the most supportive and safest care to a woman and her baby and if we can ensure that we qualify with the best knowledge and experience to help us achieve this then this will feed through and benefit the NHS, towns and cities, hospitals and most importantly the women.

I will stop myself there before I explode from over-excited enthusiasm but watch this space – I see great things for the future of midwifery.