Consultant Midwife for Public Health and Education

The Consultant Midwife for Public Health and Education has a specific role in leading on initiatives and developing strategies to promote optimum health and well-being for women in the preconception, antenatal and postnatal period. She/He will deliver innovative, evidenced based, high quality care, working with multiagency partners, across the hospital and community settings. Through partnership working the consultant midwife will seek to reduce health inequalities through improving maternal and child health, ensuring a healthy start in life.

Central to all you do will be the drive to improve women's experience and the development of care pathways that truly have the woman at the centre of care and improve continuity of care and carer.

She/he will support and encourage midwives view pregnancy and birth within the context of a social model of health and wellness including the social, psychological and emotional needs of women and their families and to develop a strong understanding of professional accountability and autonomy within midwives and other maternity care staff.

The post holder will work in clinical practice for 50% of the time.

She/he will develop educational and research programmes and contribute to the professional body of knowledge specific to this role through research, audit and evaluation; and contribute to formal teaching for pre and post registration students, curriculum planning and appropriate learning outcomes for students at Middlesex University.

Main duties of the job

There are four distinct role functions of the midwife consultant:

Expert practice

Professional leadership and consultancy

Education, training and professional development

Research, audit and evaluation, practice and service development

The Consultant Midwife will:

Provide clinical leadership; facilitate practitioners to improve their practice and maintain competence

Support and guide the team

Actively contribute to strategic planning of services

Lead the implementation of midwifery research and practice to enhance the body of midwifery knowledge

Actively participate in clinical audit and the development of evidence-based clinical standards of care. Ensure that recommendations from the National policy documents that relate to women and children's well-being, in particular Single Delivery Plan and guidance from NICE and The Royal Colleges are incorporated into local practice.

Audit practice and service; evaluate maternity care and service provision and develop appropriate service to meet the needs of diverse groups [populations]

Shares her [his] expertise and acts as a resource both internally and externally with health and social care

Whittington Health serves a richly diverse population and works hard to ensure that all our services are fair and equally accessible to everyone. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the way we look after our staff. We aim to employ a workforce which is as representative as possible of this population, so we are open to the value of differences in age, disability, gender, marital status, pregnancy and maternity, race, sexual orientation, and religion or belief. The Trust believes that as a public sector organisation we have an obligation to have recruitment, training, promotion and other formal employment policies and procedures that are sensitive to these differences. We think that by doing so, we are better able to treat our patients as well as being a better place to work.