BMidwif Midwifery

This unit aims to prepare you to promote excellence as professional midwives who make an important contribution to providing, developing and maintaining high quality and safe maternity care. The unit will enable you to reflectively develop your own philosophy for professional practice and apply this to different concepts, including leadership, safety, and personal and professional development. You will learn through a variety of blended learning approaches, including in-person and online, small group work, guest speakers, and providing and receiving peer feedback.

This unit aims to:

• Prepare learners for the role of the midwife in promoting excellence as a leader, change-maker and partner with women/birthing people and other professionals.
• Develop and foster learners’ personal philosophy for professional and ethical practice and life-long learning.

The intended learning outcomes (ILOs) and aims are all constructively aligned to ensure the teaching and assessment methods support the learners’ achievement of these to the highest standard. The assessment ensures that all aims and ILOs can be demonstrated as met during the assessment task and in order to facilitate learners’ understanding of the ILOs the following teaching methods will be used:

• Flipped classroom approach
• Seminars and small group work
• Peer feedback (formative)
• Lectures
• Specialist speakers
• Online lectures
• Online seminars
• Directed study
• Guided reading and independent study

• Demonstrate a conceptual understanding of midwifery leadership concepts to improve and develop midwifery practice, and safety in maternity services.
• Systematically reflect on your personal philosophy of professional and ethical midwifery practice.

• Acknowledge and appraise contexts in which maternity services operate.
• Critically analyse the impact of individuals and organisational mechanisms on safety in maternity services.
• Systematically reflect on and analyse your individual professional practice and learning needs, fitness to practice and willingness to change, to inform your personal development.

• Exhibit and reflect on leadership skills, communicating effectively and appropriately with a range of individuals.
• Assess, create and maintain safe environments of care, and respond effectively to complex or challenging situations.

• Demonstrate the skills and behaviours to effectively and appropriately respond to and participate in evidence-based change management in maternity services. 
• Reflect on personal qualities and development needs in preparation for entering the midwifery workforce.

Patchwork Text

Create the beginnings of a patchwork text made up of 2 separate reflective ‘patches’ built up over the course of the unit, which will be ‘stitched’ together with further patches and one final overarching patch in year 4. Within each patch analyse one area of midwifery practice.

Formative

Reflective journal to be kept throughout the unit and used to facilitate peer/academic discussion and feedback.

• Bass, J., Fenwick, J. and Sidebotham, M. (2017). Development of a Model of Holistic Reflection to facilitate transformative learning in student midwives. Women and birth: journal of the Australian College of Midwives, 30(3), pp.227–235.
• Bolton, G. and Delderfield, R. (2018). Reflective practice: writing and professional development. Fifth edition. London: SAGE.
• Downe, S., Byrom, S. and Simpson, L. (2011). Essential midwifery practice: leadership, expertise and collaborative working. Chichester, West Sussex, United Kingdom: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Gray, M., Kitson-Reynolds, E. and Cummins, A. (2019). Starting life as a midwife: an international review of transition from student to practitioner. Cham: Springer Nature.
• Kemp, J., Maclean, G.D. and Moyo, N. (2021). Midwifery Leadership. In Global Midwifery: Principles, Policy and Practice. Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 163–184.
• Northouse, PG, (2021) Leadership: Theory and Practice. 9th Edition, Sage, Thousand Oaks.
• Stanley, D. (2017). Clinical leadership in nursing and healthcare: values into action. Second edition. Chichester, West Sussex, England: Wiley-Blackwell.
• Turner, P. (2019). Leadership in Healthcare . 1st ed. Switzerland: Springer International Publishing.
• West, M., Armit, K., Loewenthal, L., Eckert, R., West, T. and Lee, A. (2015) Leadership and Leadership Development in Healthcare: The Evidence Base. Lo