Midwifery Advocate

Identify and support individual midwives by addressing any practice issues highlighted through incidents, investigation or by PDP through restorative clinical supervision, acting in a timely manner to protect women and their families and minimizing the impact of incidents on the individual. Implement and evaluate quality improvement initiatives using recognized quality improvement methodologies. Enable midwifery reflection through sharing good practice, compliments, complaints, education, audit, research participation and feedback for example. Facilitates personal actions for quality improvement through learning, reflection and implementation of guidance into practice with individual midwives.

Provides leadership for midwifery practice within the clinical workplace. Facilitates group supervision activities on a regular basis. Enable womens choices through enabling midwifery practice, providing balanced and unbiased information to facilitate informed consent and choices. Act as a professional advocate for midwives and women through leadership behaviours and expert clinical practice.

Develop and support individuals through education and practice development programs as identified through incident, investigations or PDPs. Liaise with Higher Education Institutions to develop robust academic action plans to support individual improvement in midwifery practice. Liaise with HEI and Quality and governance directorate team to identify broader gaps in education and training programs as a result of incident reviews. Review national guidelines and benchmark recommendations against current midwifery practice; advise quality and governance team accordingly.

Contribute to the review of existing guidelines and the development of new ones as appropriate providing expert, evidence based midwifery knowledge. Work closely with the wider multi-disciplinary team to ensure midwifery representation at meetings and forums. Support newly qualified midwives in their preceptorship period to enable fulfilment of the programme and facilitate adherence and compliance with the agreed standards. Acts as a change agent to develop practice at an individual level and enables wider cultural and systematic change through leadership.