Working life
You’ll mainly deal with pregnant women requiring professional support and advice. You are likely to be the lead health professional and contact for a woman, providing evidence-based information and helping her make informed choices about the options and services available throughout her pregnancy.
You’ll be the expert on childbirth and your responsibilities are likely to be diverse. You’ll provide:
- provide full antenatal care, including parenting classes, clinical examinations and screening
- identify high-risk pregnancies
- monitor women and support them during labour and the birthing process
- teach new and expectant mothers how to feed, care for and bathe their babies
You could be working with women from a variety of backgrounds and you will need to be confident enough to communicate with different people. Some women and their families might be homeless, socially excluded, have disabilities or be very young. Other clients may be from certain cultural or religious backgrounds.
All women will need you to understand the emotional, physical and psychological processes of pregnancy and birth. Sometimes pregnancies do not go to plan and you will need to offer support and advice on stillbirth, miscarriage, termination,neonataldeath andneonatalabnormalities.
If you are working as a community midwife, you are likely to develop good professional relationships with your families, which can make counselling easier at difficult times.
