"You and Me Do It for the Love of Teaching": Exploring the Expansion of Clinical Training Opportunities for Midwives

To better understand the barriers and facilitators to precepting midwifery students from across the healthcare ecosystem in New Jersey.

Growing the midwifery workforce is a crucial step to alleviating disparately poor perinatal health outcomes and expanding access to care. Difficulty recruiting and retaining preceptors has been identified as a barrier to graduating more midwives.

In-depth qualitative interviews were conducted with 19 individuals involved in different stages of the clinical training process: midwives, physicians, and administrators. Transcripts were coded using the tenets of qualitative description and thematic analysis. Analysis was guided by the Promoting Action on Research Implementation in Health Services framework.

The following themes were identified and organized within the domains identified by our conceptual framework. Evidence: (mis)understanding the benefits of midwifery care and impacts on patient care. Context: the time and energy it takes to precept and practice considerations. Facilitations: developing the next generation of healthcare providers and the quiet and ever-present role of money in healthcare.

Findings from this study support the importance of approaching midwifery precepting as a multifaceted endeavor, one that necessitates the full support of individuals within many different roles in an organization.

Getting buy-in from various levels of the healthcare ecosystem requires a flexible approach but must include a targeted effort toward showing the value of midwifery care in terms of patient outcomes, satisfaction, and cost.