Community midwives' change for the better

Community midwifery changes mean better, more local, more accessible care

 

Community midwives at the Rosie Hospital have made changes to the way they cover the area. The reorganisation will result in improvements for everyone concerned – staff, pregnant women, and babies – with simpler lines of communication, less travelling, and improved quality of care from more locally-oriented teams.

 

Previously, four teams of midwives from the Rosie were responsible for looking after expectant mothers and newborn babies in most of Cambridgeshire and parts of Suffolk and Essex. The same midwives are now working in eight smaller teams, each of which is focussed on a much smaller geographic area.

 

Where teams were previously located around GP surgeries’ areas, they are now based in eight of the county’s Children’s Centres. That puts an end to the situation of two midwives visiting two houses in the same road on the same day simply because the mothers have different GPs. It will also give teams a place to meet every morning to discuss the women under their care and plan the most effective use of their time – a big improvement from the previous arrangements, which relied on midwives spending up to an hour on the phone before leaving their house.

 

In addition, the old pager-based system of contacting a midwife has been replaced with a new messaging service, meaning that appointments with midwives will no longer be interrupted by phone calls from other pregnant women. Instead, all mothers will be given a dedicated phone number for non-urgent contact with their midwifery team. Calls to these lines will be dealt with every 24 hours. Urgent calls will continue to go to the relevant departments at the Rosie.

 

Jan Butler, consultant midwife, said: “Our community midwives work extremely hard to deliver a safe, caring service to women across the area served by the Rosie, and we are very proud of what they do. These changes will make it easier for them to get on with that job, with better planning, less travelling, and more time to spend with pregnant women. This is also good news for expectant mums, who should find that their appointments are much less likely to be interrupted, and that it’s much easier to get in touch with their local midwifery team. The new smaller areas will also mean women and their babies have better continuity, with fewer midwives sharing responsibility for their care.”

 

 

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