Midwifery Advocate

The Professional Midwifery Advocate will support midwives in practice either following an incident or as identified on their individual Practice Development Plan at appraisal; this role will also enable midwives to support women who make choices outside of conventional recommendations for care, promoting autonomy and accountability for midwifery practice at all times and enabling women to make informed choices.

This post supports the quality and governance agenda within Maternity and is key to ensuring that midwifery practice is safe, evidence based and current, advising on changes nationally to practice and implementing them in local practice. The post holder will be instrumental in quality improvement measures and implementing change as a credible clinical practitioner.

The role will have links with midwifery education at both Keele and Staffordshire university to support learning for individuals who have been involved with incidents.

A key aspect of this role is to support safe and effective practice, ensuring that individual education needs are in line with the maternity strategy and Training Needs Analysis in turn reflect National standards (including NICE, NMC, RCOG) and are met. Support the benchmarking process of all new national guidance such as NICE and RCOG as required and assist the Guidelines Co-ordinator in the development and updating of new and existing guidelines.

University Hospitals of North Midlands NHS Trust is one of the largest and most modern in the country. Based across two sites, Royal Stoke in Stoke-on-Trent and County Hospital in Stafford, we are proud to serve around three million people and we're highly regarded for our facilities, teaching and research. We are the specialist centre for major trauma for the North Midlands and North Wales.

All of our employees make a valuable contribution regardless of role here at UHNM and we are proud of our wide range of development packages aimed at ensuring that everyone has the opportunity to fulfil their true potential.

UHNM create and encourage a culture of inclusion, providing equal opportunities for career development that are fair and transparent. We are committed to being a diverse and inclusive employer and foster a culture in which all staff feel valued and respected. In return we ask all of our employees to make a commitment to the values, co-created by or staff, patients and carers, and that unite us as a Trust.

At University Hospitals of North Midlands NHS Trust we know that investing in, supporting and developing our staff has a direct impact on the quality of care that we deliver. Our employees are as important as our patients and the population that we serve.

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 women’s 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.