Changes to Midwifery Supervision for Student Midwives and Supervisors

Adapted from an article originally written in the Student Nursing Times. 

October 2019

Last year the NMC published new standards for Nurses, Nursing Associates and Midwives; this included changes to the standards for student supervision and assessment (SSSA). The SSSA will be implemented across all Universities and their partnered Trusts by 2020, which means in practice that many new September starters and returning second and third year students will have the new standards in place for the start of this academic year.

Student midwives often struggle in practice, and this article does not aim to address the concerns of the regulator, higher education institutions or the trusts where students work, the focus of this article is to bring the experience of students forward.

There has been a lot of talk among students about how this will affect practice learning, and as it also includes a separation of the role of Personal Tutor and Academic Assessor, there will also be a change at University level too. Jayne Marshall and Cathy Ashwin in the September 2019 edition of Midirs say the SSSA aims to provide students with a more holistic experience of practice and assessment. There is also general consensus that a major focus for the NMC is to make the assessment and supervision of students more impartial, as it aims to remove the relationship from the assessment.

Mentorship has been an informal aspect of practice based learning for many years, and since 2008 mentorship has been mandatory. This included a requirement to work with a sign-off mentor for at least 40% of your placement, and in reality this was quite hard to achieve. Sign-off mentors would need to change their rota, students would need to change their rota, and anyone responsible for the rota was stuck in the middle! There was also the very real possibility that students and sign-offs might not get on, and that this would negatively impact student assessment. (The flip side of course is that a sign-off/student relationship may positively bias grading.) The removal of the 40% requirement should in theory allow for greater flexibility with regard to the off-duty. Students are no longer reimbursed for their work in the NHS, therefore this flexibility could be a great advantage – allowing students to accommodate child care needs for example. The requirement to work with an Assessor for an initial assessment, then periodic and summative assessments would still stand, but during other working shifts we are assigned a Supervisor – who could be another registrant or a non-registered health care professional. With no mandated requirement for continuity with a Supervisor, there could be flexibility here. Of course the impact of continuity on the acquisition of knowledge and skills would be something we would also need to consider ourselves, which may in fact mean asking for (and accommodating it) if necessary.

This responsibility and flexibility extends past the off-duty, we are adult learners and this could be a good opportunity to take more responsibility for our practice based learning. By thinking more about what we hope to achieve; how the outcomes set by the Regulator can be used by us to inform our learning; and how this can be applied to day-to-day practice. The relationship with the Assessor will demand a higher level of formal evidence from the student – in order to attain a higher grade – with the responsibility on us to provide evidence of our knowledge and skills in written as well as hands-on format. This change will impact us all, and there is scope for great improvements in our experiences of practice based learning, if we are prepared to take up the challenge.

References 

Standards (Part 2) for Student Supervision and Assessment (2018) - https://www.nmc.org.uk/standards-for-education-and-training/standards-for-student-supervision-and-assessment/

Pre-2018 Standards to Support Learning and Assessment in Practice (2006, updated in 2008) - https://www.nmc.org.uk/globalassets/sitedocuments/standards/nmc-standards-to-support-learning-assessment.pdf