BACKGROUND:
Ensuring a well-educated, clinically competent, adequately resourced, and sustainable midwifery workforce is essential for delivering high-quality maternity care. However, the serious shortage of midwives currently inhibits midwives’ efforts to promote safe and adequate care, as well as to supervise midwife students and less experienced colleagues.

OBJECTIVES:
This project will monitor 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 students’ clinical competencies, and provide decision-makers’ suggestions on how a clinically competent and sustainable workforce of midwives can be ensured in Norwegian maternity care.

METHODS:
This national Norwegian project constitutes five work packages (WP) including 1) one open cohort study with midwife students at graduation and 1+3 years later, 2) one cohort study of midwives in clinical positions, midwives with other work tasks and those who have left the profession, 3) one study based on a national register on sick leave and 4) one development and feasibility for designing new technologies to improve midwife students’ and midwives’ clinical competencies. In the last WP relevant results will be presented and discussed in focus groups by key persons and decision makers in labour and postpartum care, such as midwives, midwife lecturers, leaders/managers, economists, politicians and other stakeholders in maternity care and midwife education.

RESULTS:
We propose a session where CompMid researchers will orally present the first findings from each WP (please see abstracts from Lønnebotn et al, Aanensen et al, Sørbye et al), introduced by me as project leader. Recruitment and data collection are ongoing, and baseline results will be available for presentation at the congress.

CONCLUSIONS:
Findings from four work packages will be synthesized and discussed at the congress.

KEY MESSAGE:
We will offer insights in how to ensure a clinically competent and sustainable midwifery workforce in Norway. Continuity of care - implementation 1