Applicants to A Nurse‐Midwifery Education Program Disclose Factors that Influence Their Career Choice

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to explore the factors that influenced nurses to choose midwifery as a career path. Forty-two application essays to the Frontier School of Midwifery and Family Nursing were reviewed. Content analysis was used to identify themes and to explore motivational factors. Six themes concerning motivation to become a midwife were identified. These included personal birth experience, love of maternity nursing, seeing midwifery as a calling, encouragement from others (especially midwives), an epiphany moment, and using nursing as a stepping stone to midwifery. The six themes were seen in more than 20% of the application essays. Several potential recruitment strategies stem from these themes, especially the importance of nurse-midwives' encouragement of others to pursue a midwifery career.

Voices of Midwives

“…Some themes that emerged from the stories of the 10 midwives confi rmed and expanded the fi ndings of other earlier studies (Fiedler, 2001;Ulrich, 2009;Ventre & Spindell, 1995) on various aspects of midwifery as a career path. In addition, the current study expands knowledge about midwifery by elucidating the diffi culties encountered in balancing work and family responsibilities, and demonstrating midwives' feelings of stress, disappointment, and frustration both in the workplace and at home.…”

“…Such an experience could lead to that epiphany moment mentioned in Ulrich's (2009) study. The study presented here moves beyond reasons for choosing the study of human experience from the vantage point of those experiencing the phenomenon under investigation.…”

“…In one qualitative study examining the factors that motivated nurses to pursue midwifery as a career path (Ulrich, 2009), six themes emerged from the data: personal birth experience, love of maternity nursing, seeing midwifery as a calling, encouragement from others (especially midwives), an epiphany moment, and using nursing as a steppingstone to midwifery. An earlier study by Ventre and Spindell (1995) surveyed 65 directentry midwives who had become CNMs to enumerate their reasons for choosing a career in midwifery.…”

The effects of work alienation on organisational commitment, work effort and work-to-family enrichment

“…It focuses especially on midwives. Midwifery is often described as a calling (Ulrich , Carolan & Kruger , Skinner et al . ).…”

Midwifery and the Crowning of Health Care Reform

“…Births attended by midwives continue to rise as family medicine physicians and obstetricians face medicolegal and other challenges, forcing them to constrain the provision of prenatal and intrapartum care 26,27 . However, in the face of the increased need for midwives, there is a 50% decrease in the number of newly‐certified CNMs/CMs and a 25% decrease in number of CNM/CM education pro‐grams 28 . Because of the increased need for midwives and decreased minting of new midwives, those in practice report working up to 80‐hour weeks to meet the needs of mothers and babies 27 .…”