International Day of the Midwife

Catherine, tell us about your role?

I am the lead midwife for maternal medicine at CUH, and I also work as a bank staff nurse.

As part of my role, I am the lead for the Obstetric Close Observation Unit which is a small unit capable of caring for people who require level 2 High dependency care and extra observations either to manage medical problems or because of complex births.

I am also the lead for Clinic 22, the Maternity Day Assessment unit and the Obstetric IV iron infusion service.

What do you enjoy most about your role?

I enjoy caring for people with complex medical conditions throughout their pregnancy and childbirth journeys.

Tell us a bit about your CUH journey – when did you join?

I started at CUH in 2007 as a healthcare support worker just before I started my adult nurse training here.

What positions have you held here and why do you like working at CUH?

Once qualified I worked in John Farman Intensive Care Unit (D3). I did my midwifery conversion course at West Suffolk Hospital but remained on the staff bank here as a nurse.

I took up a substantive midwifery post here in 2017, working initially as a rotational midwife before discovering the Obstetric Close Observation Unit (OCOU) and a love of caring of high-risk mothers and their babies. I became the lead for the unit in 2020.

The launch of CUH as a maternal medicine centre in 2022 means that I now not only care for high-risk patients in Cambridge but across the East of England.

I love being a small part of a huge multidisciplinary team that makes a real difference to patient outcome and experience.

What does a usual day look like?

I start my day with checking in on the team on OCOU and seeing how their workload is. I then pull a report on all obstetric patients admitted across CUH and work with the maternity bleep holder to arrange midwifery visits.

I then check for any regional referrals, discuss with the multidisplinary team (MDT) and arrange appointments. I will also arrange MDT meetings to discuss patient cases both within CUH and externally across the region.

My afternoons can consist of running a midwife led clinic but I also love being present at a birth, particularly if I have cared for the patient throughout their pregnancy.

What advice would I give to anyone looking to get into midwifery?

I'd recommend researching what the profession involves and where it’s possible to gain clinical exposure.

Midwifery is a broad profession, ranging between facilitating homebirths to looking after people requiring the High Dependency Unit (HDU) care in the hospital and a whole variety of things in between!