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Parenting

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Original poster

nursing or midwifery

45 replies

livvysmum · 02/04/2005 22:53

does having been a nurse first make you a better midwife. is going straight into midwifery going to give you enough scope to specialise or expand your career. is it better to study nursing first then go into m/w,
i'm a few years off studying anything yet, but am always pondering...
ponder ponder...

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Donbean · 06/04/2005 20:02

This is a subject that i have been thinking about allot lately. My ultimate ambition is to complete midwifery training but cant contemplate it at the moment.
I am a qualified nurse and work in critical care. We get pre eclamptics and women with eclampsia (very very few these days thank goodness!) I do feel somewhat advantaged to have the experience but by no means think that i would be any better than any one else because i am still entering into the unknown. That is why it is called training and education, its learning new things.
I have been thinking seriously about midwifery for about 5 years but it just has never been the right time.
An interesting discussion with many points that i agree with and some that i dont.
IMHO if you want to do it do it by whatever means presented to you and good luck.

oatcake · 06/04/2005 20:22

Mears. Have to disagree with the extra year IF the uni has an excellent, well-thought out curriculum. The problem with my uni (and vickiyumyum's!) is their total lack of organisation and badly thought out curriculum.

And don't get me started on evidence based learning which seems to be a lazy way of 'teaching'. I could see the need for an extra year when it's executed as badly as ours as so many of us feel poorly equipped with the skills/knowledge necessary for dealing with life and death situations.

Given and coherent, well-organised curriculum, 3 years is plenty.

Midwifery is brilliant. If direct entry is available, and you know your heart isn't in general nursing, then there's no choice to be made.

vickiyumyum · 06/04/2005 21:31

oatcake - i know exactly what you mean, we could spend all day finding fault with the way our uni runs it course. in hindsight if you have the flexibilty, i would recommend finding a teaching course and not one that is solely reliant on evidence based learning. although i'm sure that there will be others out there at different unis that have a positive experience with evidence based learning.
i'm sure that when i come to apply for jobs in other health trusts the only thing that will go against me is the uni that i attended. and i only applied to this one as moving at that time wasn't an option, although now i cannot wait for the course to finish so that i can go back up north.

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strugstu · 06/04/2005 21:55

completely agree, organisation is very poor at my uni. am unsure if i will really be able to do the job as well as i would like to if and when i qualify.

PS. someone mentioned earlier u need to be a nurse befor u can be a HV, not strictly true, u need a 'health qualification' i am on hv course at mo and there are a couple of direct entry midwives, i was surprised, but they are fab and equally as competent.

Toothache · 07/04/2005 09:32

Thanks Mears.

Chloeb2002 - I want to study Midwifery as I have a total fascination with the biology and science of conception, pregnancy, birth, postnatal care etc. I would LOVE to care for pregnant women, develop a relationship with them and have the privelige and honour of delivering their babies. I want to be able to make it a special time for parents and maybe make a difference. I am hopefully prepared for all the not so happy times too and hope to help make difficult situations as easy as possible.

I would love to help women breastfeed (I had real difficulty and lacked support with ds). I would be keen to educate women on PND.

I understand that there are many aspects of Nursing in Midwifery, but in the end my interest and total enthusiasm is with caring for Antenatal and Postnatal women. And obviously the babies too.

So I have no interest in working in A&E or surgical wards, or caring for terminally ill cancer patients or people awaiting transplants. I'm sure Nurses specialise in areas that interest them.

The difference with Midwifery is there is now the option to specialise immediately. So that's what I want to do!!!!! Hope that helps alleviate any 'questions' you have as to why someone would want to study Midwifery and not study general Nursing!

tiredemma · 07/04/2005 09:47

excellent post toothache- nail hit on head completly.

mears · 07/04/2005 09:59

Good reasons to train as a midwide Toothache. That is why I think the current course should be extended by a year - to give training midwives more indepth knowledge of the nursing required when things go wrong such as appendicectomy during pregnancy, appendicectomy at C/S, passing naso gastric tubes, managing wound drains, CVP lines. Deep vein thrombosis management, pulmonary embolism, cardiomyopathy, management of wound infections, asthma, diabetes etc. These things are all touched on but not in much depth. My nursing knowledge has been useful for me working in the labour ward with high dependeny women.

Toothache · 07/04/2005 10:20

Good points Mears. Are there individual independant courses/lectures that trainee MW's could perhaps attend voluntarily to learn about some of those procedures and conditions? Maybe even sit in on a few of the Nursing lectures that are relevant?

mears · 07/04/2005 10:45

There are stand alone modules that are offered but they are all theory based. I think the placements in general nursing are probably not the best but the problem is that clinical areas cannot place the number of students. Some of the placements are a bit light weight I think.

oatcake · 07/04/2005 16:02

But Mears, just like driving a car, you don't actually start to learn until you pass your test / qualify. No amount of extra uni tuition will help until you see a situation in real life.

What today's training does, I think, is to equip the student with a knowledge of identifying when things aren't going as they should be. Whereupon, experienced or newly qualified midwives, I would think, seek a second opinion from colleagues.

I mean, at the end of the day, some of the conditions you mentioned would be passed to the Doctor/Reg on call anyway, and not be totally dependent on the midwife.

nailpolish · 07/04/2005 16:06

mears some placements are lightweight i agree

was chatting with a newly qualified staff nurse last night who had a private day nursery as her paediatric placement!

oatcake · 07/04/2005 16:07

... but yes, agree about many "lightweight placments"...

nailpolish · 07/04/2005 16:10

i learned sweet F all at college, didnt realise it til i started work

oatcake · 07/04/2005 16:15

and that, np, is what is causing a lot of distress to me and my colleagues...

mears · 07/04/2005 16:16

Oatcake - I agree they will be passed on by midwives, but sometimes it is the midwife who needs to point the doctor in the right direction. Doctors don't pass nasogastric tubes or take CVP readings etc. Midwiives need to be able to identify when there are problems emerging. This is learnt over time but my direct entry colleagues have said that they wished they knew more about these thinmgs.

nailpolish · 07/04/2005 16:17

yes yes yes mears

not everything is textbook

you can have a pt with perfectly normal obs but you know something is wrong

or a perfectly fine looking pt with crappy obs

we had 4 arrests last night

just had to get that off my chest

oatcake · 07/04/2005 16:22

Agree Mears. But as I said, it's all about a well-thought out curriculum... it is possible to learn all the extremely important things you mentioned within the 3 years.

I think I'm a bit too despondent with my uni imo... And, I'm very scared about qualifying. But midwifery is what I want to spend my remaining work years doing. I mean, it's only taken me 20(! Now that's even scarier...!) years to bite the bullet and train for a vocation rather than just a job...!

vickiyumyum · 08/04/2005 10:17

i can't speak for the other unis, but we have had or are going to have some basic theory and practice on most of the conditions, pratcices that you mention for example naso-gastric tubes, we need to know this as qualified midwives for the transitional care babies, and we should also learn about it on our placement in icu.
i have met fully qualified nurses who don't know how to do a number of procedures that we have already learnt.
i don't see that there is an argument for having to have completed a course in nursing first as both nursing and midwifery are all about continuosly learning and updating your skills. qualified midwifes have a duty to continue learning as a requirement to staying on the register ( i am assuming that this is the same for qualified nurses too)if you are willing to learn and do not treat your training as a holiday or the fun befroe the hardwork starts and you have good people skills then i think that you have every chance of making a great direct entry midwife.

mrsmac300 · 08/04/2005 15:01

Hello I am a mother of two children under 4, really hoping to go to uni soon to do nursing. Is anyone already studing in the same situation and how do you manage child care? Do the uni help in any way with funding?

oatcake · 08/04/2005 15:51

mrsmac300, would you like to start a new thread to this effect as livvysmum's inital query was about whether to do a direct entry course or nursing prior to midwifery.

nb as a student midwife, I believe a number of the students get an extra allowance for childcare - my husband has been too lazy to fill his bits in in the application form as yet...

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