Project information

Ensuring a well-educated, clinically competent, adequately resourced, and sustainable midwifery workforce is crucial for delivering high-quality care to women in maternity care. However, the serious shortage of midwives, globally and in Norway, currently inhibits midwives’ efforts to promote safe and adequate care, and to effectively supervise midwife students and less experienced colleagues. Further, the situation may impact midwives' overall health contributing to increased sickness absence.

Thus, the overall purpose of this project is to contribute knowledge to inform strategies aimed at 1) retaining experienced and competent midwives in maternity care, and 2) to ensure high-quality clinical training for both midwife students and midwives.

To do so, we will investigate Norwegian midwife students’ clinical competence at various stages, midwives’ self-rated competence, work-related intentions and risk factors for leaving work, and potential factors contributing to sickness absence. Based on that, we will develop and evaluate digital learning tools to improve both midwives’ and midwife students’ clinical competence and formulate best practices for how a sustainable and clinically competent workforce of midwives can be ensured in Norwegian labor and postpartum wards.

We will employ a broad dissemination and exploitation strategy targeting and involving all Norwegian universities providing midwifery education, relevant policy makers from the Norwegian health sector, and industry stakeholders.

As a result, this project will enable monitoring midwife students’ self-reported clinical competence, provide insights into how to retain and reintegrate experienced midwives into the workforce, how to prevent sickness absence, suggest new learning tools to enhance midwives’ and students’ clinical competencies, and finally, provide decision-makers’ suggestion on how a clinically competent and sustainable workforce of midwives can be ensured in Norwegian maternity care.