Strengthening quality midwifery for all mothers and newborns

Midwifery is "skilled, knowledgeable and compassionate care for childbearing women, newborn infants and families across the continuum throughout pre-pregnancy, pregnancy, birth, postpartum and the early weeks of life.

Over the years, resolutions on nursing and midwifery adopted by the WHO World Health Assembly have helped to provide a strong foundation for strengthening nursing and midwifery services. The most recent resolution, WHA 64.7, gives WHO the mandate to develop and strengthen strategies such as: capacity of nursing and midwifery workforce through the provision of support to Member States on developing targets, action plans and forging strong interdisciplinary health teams as well as strengthening the dataset on nursing and midwifery.

Midwifery has a strong public health function, for example through ensuring access to clean water and sanitation during childbirth, supporting breastfeeding mothers, delivering family planning services and tobacco cessation in pregnancy.

Key messages:

• When midwives are educated to international standards, and midwifery includes the provision of family planning, it could avert more than 80% of all maternal deaths, stillbirths and neonatal deaths. Achieving this impact also requires that midwives are licensed, regulated, fully integrated into health systems and working in interprofessional teams;
• Beyond preventing maternal and newborn deaths, quality midwifery care improves over 50 other health-related outcomes, including in sexual and reproductive health, immunization, breastfeeding, tobacco cessation in pregnancy, malaria, TB, HIV and obesity in pregnancy, early childhood development and postpartum depression;
• Midwives are uniquely able to provide essential services to women and newborns in even the most difficult humanitarian, fragile and conflict-affected settings. This means that midwives will make a significant contribution to delivering on the commitments made in the Astana Declaration on Primary Health Care and the Global Action Plan on Healthy Lives and Well-Being;
• Educating midwives to international standards is a cost-effective investment as it saves resources by reducing costly and unnecessary interventions;
• Yet there is a startling lack of investment in quality midwifery education, despite the evidence of impact. Now is the time to take collective action.