Programme learning outcomes
Statement of Purpose
Master of Midwifery in Midwifery (MMid Midwifery)
Note: This document and our programme learning outcomes use the words 'woman' or 'mother' throughout. These should be taken to include people who do not identify as women but are pregnant or who have given birth.
The Master of Midwifery (MMid Midwifery) at the University of York is a unique programme, designed to accelerate your career and enable you to positively impact midwifery and maternity care. You will become a skilled, knowledgeable and compassionate midwife, providing comprehensive care for women, newborn infants and families. Your practice will be characterised by advanced scholarship, critical thinking skills and your quest for excellence. You will display an autonomous professional identity, underpinned by comprehensive interpersonal skills and fluency in building and sustaining relationships with women, families and colleagues in interdisciplinary and multi-agency care teams.
This fully integrated masters level programme provides an equal balance of theory and practice learning across each year. Well established partnerships with our valued NHS Trusts will facilitate practice learning, supervision and assessment throughout your programme. Placements encompass hospital, midwifery led unit and community settings, and include continuity of care and carer models and caseload holding. Your practice will be informed by learning in our extensive clinical simulation unit, as you develop and demonstrate increasingly complex clinical skills. Two clinical electives will further strengthen your practice learning; a second year national and/or international opportunity which recognises midwifery as part of a global profession, and a fourth year UK based placement which advances your interests and engagement in advanced midwifery leadership.
Learning through research and enquiry is at the heart of the programme, and you will seamlessly integrate theory and practice through a range of stimulating academic and clinical modules. Interactive teaching, learning and assessment methods are used throughout, engaging and challenging you as a unique learner. You will initially gain the knowledge, skills and experience to provide safe, universal midwifery care. As you progress, your learning and practice will expand and deepen, enabling you to provide care which anticipates, prevents and responds to additional care needs and complications. In your third year you will be fully equipped to identify, critically analyse, interpret and use the best available evidence and data to inform your professional learning and actions. You will have developed contemporary knowledge, critical understanding and effective skills to work across the continuum of midwifery and hold a midwifery caseload, providing safe, respectful, empowering and equitable care, irrespective of social context and setting. Learning in your final masters year will occur in a smaller cohort, exploring content at the forefront of the midwifery discipline which will enable you to demonstrate fluent masters level clinical practice. You will critically explore contemporary midwifery practice and advanced midwifery leadership, and lead a service improvement project.
The University of York’s pre-registration midwifery education is fully accredited by the UNICEF Baby Friendly Initiative (BFI), and you will achieve these exacting standards to facilitate effective parent-baby relationships and choices regarding infant feeding.
The MMid Midwifery programme will engage, inspire, and challenge you. As an approved Nursing & Midwifery Council (NMC) programme, on successful completion you will be able to apply to practise as an NMC registered midwife, embarking on your career in the challenging but highly rewarding midwifery profession.
Programme learning outcomes
On successful completion of the programme, graduates will be able to:
Advance and critique safe, respectful, empowering and equitable midwifery care for women, their families and newborn infants, using knowledge at the forefront of your discipline to meet universal and additional needs.
Demonstrate self-direction when leading universal and additional care, supporting individualised physical, psychological, social, cultural and spiritual safety.
Exercise initiative when providing safe and effective universal and additional care which promotes continuity of care and carer.
Respond to complex issues and situations in midwifery care systematically and creatively, making sound judgments where good quality evidence may be lacking.
Demonstrate mastery as an accountable, autonomous, skilled, knowledgeable and compassionate midwife.
Role model excellence and vision when communicating with others, including professional peers and specialist/non specialist audiences.