Since I qualified and started work at my new hospital back in October I had been working on the maternity ward; a mixed antenatal and postnatal ward, and although a ward environment definitely isn’t my favourite (as you will know from my Midwife Mondays posts I wrote while training), I was enjoying it – much more than I ever did as a student!
I was due to rotate to the labour ward at the beginning of May and so was settled in to the ward for another couple of months, looking forward to a new challenge in 2 months time. However, a couple of weeks ago, I got a little surprise. The Midwife Led Birth Centre needed an extra member of staff for a couple of months so I got a message out of the blue asking me to rotate across, immediately!
I’m not going to lie, even though I was settled into the ward and was kinda enjoying it, I am definitely an intrapartum girl – that is the environment that makes me most excited to be a midwife and where I enjoy my work the most, so when I got this message, I definitely did a little happy dance and said yes without a second thought!
So, when my next shift came around, instead of pulling on my uniform, I drove into work in my jeans and changed straight into a set of blue midwife scrubs ready for my first full day on the Midwife Led Birth Centre.
I’ve now done two weeks of shifts on the birth centre, and I’ve been surprised with how easily it has all come back to me. Obviously, there are some slight changes in policy and guidelines from where I trained, but overall, it all came back to me pretty quickly. I have been really well supported since the move across, with midwives supporting me in my first baby catches on the unit, and helping me build my confidence as a newly qualified midwife – I’ve now welcomed 5 babies into the world since rotating across and I’m absolutely loving it!
Obviously, my daily work since the rotation has been impacted by the Coronavirus outbreak and I’m going to share more about that in another post next week as I’m getting lots of questions about how it is affecting my role, but overall it has been a really exciting change and I am loving every minute.
Being a newly qualified midwife can be really daunting but starting in this new area has been much more relaxed than when I started on the ward – obviously that was also starting my work at a new hospital trust too so there was bound to be a lot more to learn, but I feel really settled and comfortable with my work on this new area already – now to just see what challenges the next few weeks bring….eek!
Image by Ryan Stone
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