So many moms ask me how long I’ve been a midwife and how the way I provide care to moms and babies has changed over the last 36 years as I’ve gotten older So I’m going to repost a little tiny snippet of my Reflections from last year …….I hope you enjoy them. To be honest I hated midwifery and midwives when I started my training. I really wanted to be a Children’s Nurse and only did midwifery to fill the time in whilst I waited to start that course. I found midwives to be inti

It’s now 1992 and I chose to go to Heartlands a brand new hospital as Sorrento was closed and I hated it here at first too....a theme is developing I think! It was a far cry from Sorrento. All the midwives and auxiliary nurses knew each other from Marston Green and only four of us had come over from Sorrento,the rest had gone to Birmingham Maternity or BMH. I worked on the antenatal and postnatal wards to begin with and did settle ….. but I was keen to progress and got my fi

It’s 1996 and I’m now a Sister on Delivery Suite at Heartlands and I absolutely loved it I worked with the most amazing team of midwives and support workers for the next few years and it was absolutely fantastic. I’m not going to lie and say it was an easy time as it was extremely hard …….staffing levels weren’t great (we were always short)…… but the staff were fabulous and that was what made the difference. Everybody did lots of extra shifts and we really supported each oth

After four years on Delivery Suite and following the extremely sad stillbirth of a very special baby girl called Frances I realised I needed and wanted to specialise as a Bereavement Midwife so that I could really make a difference to families when their baby(s) died.. I had started to teach Aqua natal classes in 1992 and realised you form a very different bond with moms to be when you are all standing wet and naked following a class. Very sadly, one of the lovely moms cam

It’s 2004 and as a family we decided to move to Antigua …… so I left Burton and went back to Heartlands to update my clinical labour ward skills ready to work in the Caribbean as a midwife. It was great to be back and update my skills I did …… but sadly the Bereavement Midwife was off sick and I ended up taking over most of that role during my time there on the new Willow Suite. She has since sadly died and is greatly missed …..RIP Amanda. I replicated the Study Days I had

Being as I couldn’t make a real difference in the Government Hospital in Antigua and because there were so many babies dying (unnecessarily), I decided that these babies were going to be given the proper funerals they deserved, so I approached the two Funeral Directors on the island and one was willing to help me. I also wanted to support the mother’s (and fathers) who had lost their babies, instead of them being told off for “allowing their babies to die” amongst other

One birth that has to be mentioned was my MSW’s daughter. I had declined to care for her as her mom, my assistant could not be emotionally unbiased in the case of an emergency, so I was her “birth partner” at the hospital instead of her midwife. What I witnessed that day and what she went through has NO place on here …But three years later I was called as the chief witness in the High Court. This has to be the most terrifying thing I have ever had to prepare for …….taking o

It’s 2009 and economically things are not good in Antigua, but I have seen my next “Dream Job” advertised at the Perinatal Institute back in the UK so I apply, take a gamble and book a flight for the interview. The role was to work on the “Confidential Enquiries into Stillbirth “ in the West Midlands as a Project Midwife where cases are totally anonymised, prepared and examined to within an inch of their lives by a panel of twelve senior doctors / midwives / paediatricians /

Now 2010 and the project had finished, but I needed to stay in England for another six months, so I applied for a job on Community at City Hospital, believing it would be temporary…. Again how wrong could I be? I was there for a further ten years. One thing life has taught me is that nothing is predictable and your life really does take many twists and turns, and most of them you don’t see coming. I really enjoyed caring for women again and of course working with amazing midw

Sometimes you are just not in the right place for yourself, and as much as you try ….. you are a square peg in a round hole and that is ok. Someone has to be the square peg (it’s usually me) and I do believe living abroad changes you forever ……you have experienced a different way of living and as I said previously, all of our experiences shape us. During my time at City, Yummy Mummies however went from strength to strength and I was now teaching pregnancy yoga in Harborne

Now I move to Good Hope as a Community Midwife. The job was advertised as Heartlands, but I was offered Four Oaks, which I had never wanted to work in before because of the “conflict of interest” of doing my classes in an area I worked in. I had stayed well away on purpose. I accepted it knowing I would never morally tell my pregnant patients about my classes as some things are just wrong and not to be done I was there for two years, and once again I found it difficult to s

It’s now January 2023 and I’m happy with my decision to leave the NHS and concentrate on my classes…….however I now feel I have lost my identity When all you have done is work all your life, it’s a very strange feeling when you have nowhere to be and no one to report to anymore You have no uniform to iron and no need to set an alarm clock Of course I still had my lovely amazing classes to teach which I adore more than anything …..however, would the pregnant moms still respe

It’s October 2024 and my Legacy Midwife Contract completed at the end of March this year. It was shall we say an “interesting” role and sadly didn’t pan out as I had imagined it would have. Many of the newly qualified midwives welcomed us with open arms, eager to learn, but sadly not all. Myself and Sara were offered extensions of our contracts, but Sara is much younger than me, has a new role and moved onto well deserved pastures new and I quite honestly didn’t want to stay