Continuing your professional development
Once qualified, midwives are responsible for keeping their knowledge up to date. This is required by the Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) and encouraged by your employer.
Career opportunities
Once you've qualified as a midwife and gained some expeience, you'll have a wide range of options to develop your career in the directions that interest you most.
Specialist expertise
Modern midwives are taking on new responsibilities including prescribing and administering some drugs, undertaking perineal repair and using scanning equipment to monitor the baby's normal development. Midwives can also develop specialist expertise in areas such as infant feeding, family planning and counselling, for example in HIV, bereavement and congenital abnormalities. There are also opportunities for midwives to work in the European Union and the rest of the world.
Senior practitioner and management roles
As your knowledge and expertise grow, you could move into more senior practitioner roles. Becoming a team or unit manager, you could combine responsibility for managing other staff with ongoing hands-on involvement with mothers and babies. You might consider the role of consultant midwife, which provides clinical leadership for midwives and others across maternity services, or a management role such as head of midwifery services or supervisor of midwives at local authority level.
Education and research
Midwives can take further qualifications in teaching and mentoring to enable them to supervise and teach student midwives. Some then go on to pursue an academic career in a university, teaching future midwives and carrying out research that helps move the profession forward. Or you may prefer a lecturer-practitioner role, which allows you to combine an interest in teaching with hands-on midwifery practice.
Related professions
Midwives may choose to move into other related professions, such as neonatal nursing or health visiting. Neonatal nurses care for women and babies with health complications around birth, for example, helping pre-term babies get through the critical first few days after they're born. Health visitors work with families at home and in the community, promoting good health with a focus on young children.
Supporting your development
Your career in midwifery and child health could move through different elements of practice development, research, teaching and management.
We offer a wide range of opportunities for continuing professional development and lifelong learning to support you at every stage of your career, including events and seminars, study days, short courses and qualifications at undergraduate and postgraduate level.
- Find out more about our continuing professional development opportunities.
To support your professional development we offer:
- Events and seminars
- Study days
- An extensive range of short courses and longer qualifcations at undergraduate and postgraduate level
- Research degrees
- Tailormade training and education to meet your specific needs.
