Midwives have the opportunity take part in an award-winning training scheme to support normality in childbirth.

The Back to Basics training, which is accredited by the Royal College of Midwives (RCM), is a package, including an interactive DVD, to update midwives in their basic skills.

The need for the Back to Basics training arose when the Department of Health policy Maternity Matters (April 2007) required greater choices for women in where they give birth.

Dependent on their clinical need, women can now give birth:

• at home
• in a stand-alone midwifery unit
• in a midwifery unity attached to an obstetric unit
• in a consultant-led unit.

Tracie Fulton, maternity and new born workforce specialist at NHS West Midlands, said it was recognised that midwives who had trained in medically-led units, might need to be up-dated in their skills supporting women giving birth at home or in midwife-led units.

“The Back to Basics training was designed to ensure that skills which perhaps has not been fully developed in medically-led units could be revisited or learned,” she said.

The training package, devised by Claire Allan, matron at University Hospitals Coventry, Warwick NHS Trust, and Alison Talbot, matron,  at Worcestershire Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, was created to meet this need.

It won the Bounty Award for Promoting Normal Birth in 2010. The RCM praised the package as “pioneering.”

The training consists of three elements:

• pre-course reading
•  face-to-face training session
• an interactive DVD.

The DVD comprises six scenarios based on potential real life experiences.  Midwives have to answer prompts and think about how they would approach a number of situations, including attitudes of staff towards the women in their care and also between members of the medical team.

The training considers best practice in areas such as:

• communication
• telephone triage
• latent phase of labour
• diagnosis of labour
• birth environment
• pain relief and aids to comfort
• mechanism of labour
• positions of labour and birth
• diagnosis of second stage
• water birth
• third stage of labour.

Following the training the midwife receives a certificate.

The package has now been rolled out to obstetric staff and local universities, while training sessions for midwives outside the West Midlands have also been held.

Cathy Warwick, general secretary of the Royal College of Midwives, said: “When midwives are given the resources, support and the freedom to develop their research and work, the result is better services, better care and better health outcomes for mother, babies and their families.”

• Any midwives wanting to take part in Back to Basics training should contact the Back to Basics trainer in their unit.
• Anyone who would like a taster of the course, can download the programme for the The Back to Basics training below.

Due for review October 2013