Midwifery

You'll be evaluating how midwifery practice is shaped in the broader public health arena. You'll consider midwifery within the context of public health promotion. You'll incorporate relevant political and social drivers, championing respectful and non-discriminatory care.

Your practice will develop your understanding of national and local guidelines and legislative and professional directives, which you'll learn how to apply across the continuum of pregnancy, labour, post-natal care, and neonatal care.

You’ll hone your skills in providing compassionate and dignified care to those who experience childbirth within a disadvantageous or vulnerable context, whether it be physical, psychological, social, cultural or spiritual circumstances.

By the end of this module you'll be able to identify the characteristics of effective team working, and will have the opportunity to propose an intervention embracing the principles of health promotion suited to the demographic group. 
 

This double practice module will prepare you for and encourage you to make informed and professional judgements on issues surrounding the care of women and their families experiencing acute or life-threatening complications during childbirth.

You'll build your inner resilience, exercise your critical thinking and problem-solving techniques in childbirth emergencies, ensuring that you behave responsibly and exert effective clinical judgement when forming action plans to manage childbirth emergencies. You'll be given the opportunity to participate in several rehearsed acute emergency situations in order to equip you with the confidence you’ll need to deal with emergency childbirth situations in whatever context or setting they may occur. 

This double module will enable you to develop your transferrable and communication skills to provide care for a mother, foetus, or newborn if common or less common complications arise. You'll develop your knowledge of midwifery in terms of the impact of medical conditions experienced in maternal or neonatal health. You’ll build upon your existing knowledge of physiology to analyse chronic and acute conditions affecting the mother, foetus, or newborn. These concepts will behave as foundations in providing care throughout the antenatal, intrapartum, postpartum and neonatal periods. 

This module will ensure that you are ready to and competent to provide safe, effective, compassionate and informed care from a clinical context. You'll explore working in partnership with women within a social, psychological and biomedical perspective. You’ll use your skills to map out and determine best practice approaches to individualised evidence-based care plans.

By the end of this module you'll feel well prepared, enlightened and empowered to serve women and childbirth in a clinical setting. 
 

You'll learn to manage professional and clinical skills autonomously in this module. You'll have the opportunity to design a placement or intervention based on understanding community needs and cultural requirements. You’ll find that much of your learning will include collaboration with peers, national or international travel, and/or practice placements collaborating with peers and social care providers.

You may be interested to hear that this module is also accompanied by a tutor-led bespoke facilitation and project design, involving placements with maternity care providers in prisons, local ambulance services, infertility clinics, mother and baby units, and even a health facility in sub Saharan Africa!

Your research process is essential to formulating sound, safe and effective care plans for those under your care. In this module you'lll learn how to appraise and critique your research that informs your clinical practice. You'll develop your methodology, theory and research skills, which will enhance your understanding of a range of design methods, interpretation of data, and form the basis of your effective practice. All this will culminate in an opportunity to construct a research proposal which will enable you to encompass all the knowledge you have accrued.

In this module, you’ll undergo the preparations required to develop your role and scope as a qualified midwife. You'll study both practice-led and theoretical ideas within a contemporary socio-political context and a woman-centred care approach. You’ll consider the factors which enhance the delivery of compassionate and woman-centred maternity care. Your study will encompass leadership, risk and quality, including patient safety concerns, alongside engaging with new technologies, and developing reflective strategies to maintain your own and others well-being in both your professional and personal life. 

This module will enable you to enhance your team working skills within the realms of providing continuity of care to a small caseload of women in the maternity care setting. You’ll work in teams of 3-4 providing care to 6-7 women during the antenatal, intrapartum and postnatal period including the Newborn and Infant Physical Examination (NIPE) under supervised conditions. You'll get a chance to demonstrate your ability in professional team working skills, both in the practice and theory. As part of this module, there will be the opportunity to create a reflective personal action plan on the basis of peer, mentor and service user feedback. By the end of this module, you'll feel confident enough to manage maternity caseloads effectively as part of a team. 
 

In this final practice module you’ll prepare for practising as a qualified midwife. You'll learn the skills of accountability and autonomy enabling you to manage the role as a lead professional for the midwifery care and support of women and newborn infants throughout the whole continuum of care. You'll be encouraged to increasingly work independently, identifying your learning needs and training towards the achievement of your goals. You'll gain experience in managing care within community hospital labour and ward settings, working in partnership with women, and demonstrating achievement in Nursing and Midwifery Council (NMC) proficiencies. By the end of this module, you'll have gained the expertise and confidence to work independently and autonomously, identifying your own professional needs as a qualified midwife. 

In this module, you’ll create your penultimate piece of academic work for your degree. You’ll be offered the unique opportunity to select a topic of personal interest that is relevant to midwifery practice. Your investigation into your project will adopt methodology of choice, and you'll get the chance to demonstrate your abilities to consolidate and progress a systematic and coherent body of knowledge within your project write-up.

Placements cover the whole of Oxfordshire and enable you to practise midwifery in a variety of settings. All students will work in the Women's Centre based at the John Radcliffe Hospital, part of the Oxford University Hospitals Foundation NHS Trust. Half of your placements will be in the community, which may include a placement in one of three free-standing midwifery-led units. Please note that you will have to organise your own travel arrangements to clinical placements. You might be working in: hospital maternity wards and/or a delivery suites within the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford; integrated midwifery-led units within the John Radcliffe Hospital and The Horton General Hospital, Banbury; health centres; free-standing midwifery-led units at Chipping Norton, Wantage and Wallingford; women's homes; children's centres.