Dear All,
I rather naively in retrospect wrote recently in
the British Journal of Midwifery of concerns about the midwifery research agenda
being squeezed at a local level by obstetric controls that require Clinical
Directors approval (invariably an obstetrician) and a Doctor's permission to
access his/her patients for research. I say naively because although I
criticised an obstetric research proposal for being described as midwife-led
(the ORACLE Trial), other prominent midwifery researchers around the UK felt I
was denigrating all midwifery collaborative research.
What I am particularly interested is whether
these constraints operate locally elsewhere? And more broadly whether the term
midwifery-led' is being marginalised by a focus on 'teams' &
'multi-disciplinary working' that runs the risk of old fashioned obstetric
hegemony. Or am I just paranoid. Personally, I have had a very negative
experience of obstetric control at a local Trust level in the past year but I
don't know whether my experience is more widely felt.
Best wishes,
Denis Walsh
Lecturer in Midwifery
De Montfort University
266 London Rd
Leicester
UK
