What is it about?
Midwifery is one of the oldest professions in the world. Adding more routine public health tasks and responsibilities to their already busy workload is a potential problem in the UK. With a shortage of midwives and a shortage of NHS funding added yet another task to these ones midwives are already doing carries a risk. At the same time we see an increase in specialist midwifery roles, such as diabetes-control midwife, safey-guarding midwife, drug-misuse midwife, or smoking-cessation midwife.
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Why is it important?
Creating specialists in these roles runs the risk that the average midwife will refer service users with specific problems to the speclialist and, thereby, in the long run lose their skills and confidence in dealing with such issues. This specialisarion is nor necessarily the best solution to coping with the growing public health workload of midwives.
Perspectives
We feel too many specialist midwives' roles have introduced over the past decades without the profession taking a step back to consider what this means for the role and identify of the average UK midwife. Moreover, the national trend to add more tasks to the average midwife's job is admirable as a trust in the profession's ability to make a difference to the lives of people around pregnancy and childbirth, butwithout extra NHS funding to grow the pool of midwives this is not sustatinable in the long run.
Prof. Edwin R van Teijlingen
Bournemouth University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The evolving relationship between public health and midwifery in the United Kingdom, Discover Public Health, August 2026, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1186/s12982-026-02740-1.
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