Zaman et al. Human Resources for Health (2020) 18:73 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12960-020-00505-8 RESEARCH Open Access Experiences of a new cadre of midwives in Bangladesh: findings from a mixed method study Rashid U. Zaman1* , Adiba Khaled2, Muhammod Abdus Sabur3, Shahidul Islam4, Shehlina Ahmed5, Joe Varghese6, Della Sherratt7 and Sophie Witter8 Abstract Background: Bangladesh did not have dedicated professional midwives in public sector health facilities until recently, when the country started a nation-wide programme to educate and deploy diploma midwives. The objective of the findings presented in this paper, which is part of a larger study, was to better understand the experience of the midwives of their education programme and first posting as a qualified midwife and to assess their midwifery knowledge and skills. Methods: We applied a mixed method approach, which included interviewing 329 midwives and conducting 6 focus group discussions with 43 midwives and midwifery students. Sampling weights were used to generate representative statistics for the entire cohort of the midwives deployed in the public sector health facilities. Results: Most of the midwives were satisfied with different dimensions of their education programme, with the exception of the level of exposure they had to the rural communities during their programme. Out of 329 midwives, 50% received tuition fee waivers, while 46% received funding for educational materials and 40% received free accommodation. The satisfaction with the various aspects of the current posting was high and nearly all midwives reported that a desire to work in the public sector in the long run. However, a significant proportion of the midwives expressed concerns with equipment, accommodation, transport and prospect of transfers. The scores on the knowledge test and self-reported skill levels were varied but reasonably high. Conclusion: While the midwives are highly motivated, satisfied with many aspects of their current jobs and have adequate knowledge and skills, there are some bottlenecks and concerns that, if unaddressed, may derail the success of this programme. To capture the career progress of these midwives, additional research, including a follow-up study with the same cohort of midwives, would be beneficial to this programme. Keywords: Bangladesh, Midwives, Health workforce, Health systems * Correspondence: [email protected] 1Health and Nutrition Portfolio, Oxford Policy Management, Level 3, Clarendon House, 52 Cornmarket Street, Oxford OX1 3HJ, United Kingdom Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. Zaman et al. Human Resources for Health (2020) 18:73 Page 2 of 12 Background attendants (SBA), in addition to the questions of compe- There is significant global evidence that women and tency in fulfilling the definition of a SBA and the low up- their newborns receiving midwife-led care are less likely take of services by the community [14, 15] to develop complications and that scaling up profes- In 2010, at the 65th General Assembly of the United sional midwifery can avert maternal deaths, stillbirths Nations the Prime Minister of Bangladesh announced and neonatal deaths [1, 2]. Research also shows that producing and deploying dedicated midwives as an at- midwifery is associated with improved health outcomes tempt to have a permanent solution to the shortage of and efficient use of resources when it is provided by SBAs [4, 6]. Subsequently, the curriculum and the regu- midwives who are well-educated, trained, licensed, regu- latory frameworks for the diploma midwifery education lated and integrated into a health system with effective and mentorship programme were developed with sup- teamwork, referral mechanisms and sufficient resources port from the development partners [16, 17]. The cur- [3]. However, in 2014, only 4 out of 73 high-burden riculum has been designed to incorporate general countries (countries with 92% of global maternal and courses (Science and English), foundation courses (such neonatal mortality) had a midwifery workforce that was as anatomy and pharmacology) and professional courses adequate to meet the needs and there is a consensus that (from newborn complexities to maternity experience) more midwives are needed to improve maternal and [18]. In September 2018, 55 education and training insti- newborn survival [4, 5]. Bangladesh is one of those tutes (38 government and 17 private) had 1565 available countries which lacked dedicated midwives in its health placements (975 government and 590 private) to pro- workforce [6–8]. duce diploma midwives, while the government created Various initiatives have been taken in Bangladesh over 2996 midwifery service posts in 1733 primary healthcare the last four decades to increase the number of health- facilities across the country. In 2018, MoHFW recruited care workers with the competencies to assist women and 1143 licensed midwives and deployed them in 342 health newborn to make pregnancy and childbirth safer. Histor- facilities (Personal communications, MoHFW and ically, the nursing colleges have attempted to integrate United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA)). and provide supplementary midwifery education to The objective of this paper, which is part of a larger nurses to produce nurse-midwives to work in health fa- study, was to better understand the experience of the cilities [9]. Community maternal and child health ser- midwives in their education programme and their first vices are provided mainly by family welfare visitors posting and to assess their knowledge and skill. (FWVs), who are trained in the country’s public health administration and training institutions, named family Methods welfare visitors’ training institutes (FWVTIs), under dir- Overall design ection of the Family Planning Directorate (FPD). There were two components in this mixed method re- In the 1980s, the Ministry of Health and Family Wel- search: focus group discussions (FGDs) and a survey of fare (MoHFW) provided a short training to traditional midwives. The tools were developed based on the Inter- birth attendants (TBAs) to produce more than 50,000 national Confederation of Midwives (ICM) Global Es- trained traditional birth attendants (TTBAs) to assist sential Competencies for Midwifery Practice statements women in their communities and supplement the work [19]. The survey included a knowledge and skills test. of the FWVs, especially in hard to reach areas. The The knowledge test tools were adapted from previous programme did not achieve its intended results as stud- studies and were based on clinical scenarios of antenatal ies have shown that the TTBAs continued to adhere to care (ANC), delivery care, postnatal care (PNC), new- their traditional practices [10, 11]. Similar initiatives of born care and family planning services [20]. The skills training TBAs have failed in other countries as well and were self-assessed for various clinical procedures. the World Health Organization has cautioned against plans to simplify and delegate tasks [12, 13]. In 2003 Sampling responding to the global call to provide all pregnant A total of 1143 midwives, including 985 obtaining dip- women with a skilled birth attendant and recognising loma from public and 158 from private institutes, were that vast numbers of women still gave birth outside of a deployed in government health facilities in August 2018. health facility, the MoHFW embarked on a programme Based on this, the study required a participation of 288 to provided 6 months training to community health midwives in order to obtain results accurate to within ± workers and produced around 13,000 community skilled 5% at the 95% confidence level and a prevalence of 50%. birth attendants (CSBA). Despite large investment in this Simple random sampling was used without any cluster- programme, the impact could not be established and ing, due to the distribution of the midwives, and there- there were confusions with their dual role of providing fore, the design effect was 1. Anticipating a response community health services and as skilled birth rate of 85% and likely levels of attrition in future follow- Zaman et al. Human Resources for Health (2020) 18:73 Page 3 of 12 up surveys, we over-sampled and reached out to 331 sample. We used descriptive statistics and tested statistical midwives for the quantitative research component. The significance using a two-sample test of proportions at 95% sample was representative for the entire cohort of the confidence, where p value of < 0.05 was considered statis- midwives who have joined the public service in the first tically significant. To understand the costs associated with two batches. The sample size was large enough to detect the education programme, Bangladeshi Taka (BDT) was some statistically significant differences between the key used as the currency in the questionnaire and an exchange groups of research interest. These include the type of rate of 1 Great Britain Pound (GBP) equals 110 BDT was the education institutes (public versus private) and the used as the exchange rate during the analysis.