Midwifery Training under the New Act

Kai Tiaki : the journal of the nurses of New Zealand, Volume XV, Issue 3, 1 July 1926, Page 117

Midwifery Training under the New Act

General trained nurses have more and more recognised of late years that their knowledge of nursing is very incomplete without training m midwifery and maternity nursing. In the Act which has recently come into force the training of a midwife and that of a maternity nurse have been made two separate courses, instead of as m the past the one complete course of six months for a registered nurse, and twelve for an untrained woman. Many nurses now feel that although they do not wish to practice midwifery yet a knowledge of maternity nursing would be of great benefit to them, and are entering for the four months' maternity course only. It is of course a practical impossibility for every registered nurse to go on and obtain the midwifery certificate. There are not the number of cases to go round, and therefore many must remain content with the maternity certificate, which involves only a few conducts. As we have before pointed out, a general nurse obtains her experience

on all kinds of sickness and accident, and on all classes of patients, men, women and children, of all ages, whereas she can obtain her midwifery experience on a limited number of women only and for a short period of those women's lives. Therefore the ideal of all trained nurses complete with general and midwifery training must be given up. Even were it possible for them to be so equipped, they would still need experience m diseases of the brain before they would be fully qualified. After all this is an age of specialisation, and with medical and surgical training as a basis it is perhaps best for a nurse to choose her line of future work and take postgraduate courses to suit that line. One word of advice: A nurse who is ambitious of filling the higher positions m the profession should aim at gaining the best certificates possible, and m obstetric work should not be content with the certificate of a maternity nurse only, but give up the additional four months and become fully qualified as a midwife.