“Midwives are essential to the health of women and children”

Grandstand. The casualness of successive governments in the face of the expectations of midwives will lead to a profound and lasting deterioration in the health of pregnant women and their children. While approximately 750,000 children are born each year in France, the number of midwifery doctors and general pediatricians is approximately 1,500 for each of these specialties and is declining each year since the average age of these practitioners is 55 years old. Our country has 25,000 active midwives whose average age is 40 years. Only three inspectors from the General Inspectorate of Social Affairs (IGAS) can dare to conclude, from this observation, that demography should not guide the management of the evolution of the midwifery profession.

Maieutics is a medical discipline that became a university twenty years ago, and whose students are recruited in the first year of medical studies. These new recruits have different abilities and expectations from their elders. The number of students who enroll in midwifery had increased by 25% over the past ten years, it has suddenly decreased by 20% over the past two years.

This decline in attractiveness echoes the demands expressed by the profession for ten years, but also the degraded conditions of this education. The volume of theoretical and practical teaching has increased with the considerable extension of skills aimed at meeting the needs of public health and a growing societal demand. It is equivalent to that of odontology [medicine of the tooth and its surrounding tissues] which takes place over six years validated by an exercise thesis. This sixth year and this thesis are refused to midwifery training structures. No objective justification can explain this blockage, except the desire to maintain an overqualified workforce in an economic and statutory dependence that has become unacceptable.

National health crisis

The uneasiness of the students also reflects the fragility of the university mutation of its teaching. Half of the old schools of midwifery were not absorbed by the universities. Their funding, which is regional, is paid to the hospitals that house them. The latter are for the most part economically very fragile and the share allocated to schools is, in practice, too often limited. Furthermore, the status of midwifery teachers at university must become a central point in order to motivate them and guarantee quality teaching. A precarious associate professor status is not suitable. Teacher-researchers must be able to access a position combining clinical activity with their academic activity.

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