Midwife
Work 12 shifts a month, take home £2400 band 6 1year qualified.
Also top up with bank shifts and probably take home another £600 a month but will pick the shifts that pay most like Sunday long day or Saturday night. Still don’t work more than 4 days a week.
That’s inner London pay.
Midwifery is not a job it’s a vocation, you need to be invested 100%, if you don’t care don’t bother! You need to be detective, social worker, peace keeper, maid, cleaner, arse wiper and dogs body!
Flip it, you get to empower Women in a way no one else can, you build up a trusting relationship so quickly it’s like you have known someone 10 years within an hour, you get to be the first person to ever touch a new life, you will laugh, cry, and scream some days but then you come back to do it all over again.
If you looooove cuddling babies, don’t go into midwifery, they have their parents for that.
Midwifery is NOT nursing, we learn bloods, cannulation, IV’s, suturing, drugs towards the end of our training and in our preceptorship. We are autonomous practitioners, we can make decisions that we are accountable for (massive responsibility but massively rewarding).
Then you come on to mumsnet and see how hated the profession is, how many people complain about care they should never have received and you resolve that no one on your shift will ever feel like that! Most midwives I know try so hard to make sure “their” women are looked after and happy but there are limitations. On postnatal you can have 8-10 women and 8-10 babies, that’s 16-20 patients, most will need pain relief, anitibiotics, observations, feeding support, catheters emptying, that’s before you start with the TLC, debriefing, visitors, or women who just want a chat because their partner has gone and they are lonely after no sleep and hours and hours of feeding!
Then factor is safeguarding, drug addictions, mental health and somehow everything runs away and you are halfway through a shift, haven’t had a pee since you woke up, “lunch” will be 10 hours into your shift, and someone asks for paracetamol and you want to cry!
Then someone gives you a card and says thank you and you are SO grateful you want to cry all over again!
Then the training, you don’t just get a degree, you have to learn your hospitals own policies as well as national one, keep your practice current and evidence based (which actually means seeking out and reading the new evidence). You will want to keep learning new skills to help more women, you need to do mandatory updates and there is even more if you want to specialise.
Good luck, it really is a fabulous job for the right people