05/05/2026
Happy International Day of the Midwife!
Midwives are an essential part of the health workforce. However, in many settings, they are not enabled to provide the full scope of care for which they are educated and competent, due to regulatory, organizational, and financing constraints. As a result, care is often delivered by different healthcare workers, with limited continuity, contributing to inefficient use of resources and missed opportunities to improve outcomes and experience of care.
Transitioning to midwifery models of care addresses these challenges by organizing services around continuity of care, using woman-centred care and effective collaboration across levels of the health system. In these models, midwives serve as the main providers of maternal and newborn care to their full scope of practice, supported by interdisciplinary teams and timely referral when specialist care is required.
Global evidence shows that continuity of midwife care, where a known midwife or team provides care across pregnancy, childbirth and postnatal periods, is associated with improved health outcomes, enhanced experiences for women and families and more efficient use of health system resources. This approach also strengthens primary health care systems and contributes to the achievement of universal health coverage. The world needs midwives by 2035 to prevent 67% of the preventable maternal and newborn deaths worldwide. Now is the time to invest in midwifery, change regulations that restrict midwifery care and decrease the barriers to the training and certification of new midwives.
In Alabama, midwives are not allowed to administer the time-sensitive critical life-saving newborn screenings (NBS) to babies born at home. These babies face significant challenges to access these screenings due to the shortage of pediatricians, doctors who have unachievable requirements for babies born at home and discrimination against parents choice and babies born at home. Midwives are trained to perform these screenings that a nurse or tech usually performs in the hospital. The added expense and challenge of setting up and attending an additional appointment for the baby in the first days of life places unnecessary strain on parents and their finances. Midwives are already assessing the well-being of mom and baby in the family’s home at the time these screenings should be performed. Allowing midwives to perform these critical screenings will result in more babies being screened in a timely manner potentially preventing complications or death. As we approach midwives delivering 1% of babies born in the state of Alabama it is essential that we enable Alabama midwives to provide newborn screening to the 600 babies born at home annually, 1-2 of which could have one of the disorders screened for by these life-saving tests.
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