Midwives in England and in Italy: two realities compared

BACKGROUND: Midwives have the responsibility to provide assistance to pregnant women for non-complicated deliveries. The aim of this study was to identify the distinctive features of midwives in Italy and in England in order to provide interesting comparisons. METHODS: From September to October 2015 we administered an online questionnaire to groups of Italian and English midwives. The questionnaire was composed by a part trying to collect the sociodemographic information and a second part to define the attitudes of care and the type of approach to birth and degree of attained professional autonomy. The questions were used to create a score for 5 macro areas: "Midwifery: who is the midwife?", "Education: how much does the midwife know?", "Responsibility: what does the midwife do?", "Ethics: how does the midwife act?", "Social acknowledgment: the midwife and the other people". Results were loaded in a database and analyzed using the using STATA. RESULTS: 183 Midwives (100 Italian and 83 English) completed the questionnaire. 92% of Italian respondents said to have a "Bachelor", 6% a "University Diploma" and only 2% a "Diploma". 80% of British midwives had a "Midwifery Degree" and 8% attended a "Midwifery Short Program", a degree course in Nursing with an additional specialization of a year and a half in Midwifery. 34% of the Italian claimed to have also a "1st level Master", 16% a "Full Degree" and the remaining 50% attended post degree training courses. Only 23% of the English sample had a "Master of Science" and the remaining 67% reported to have "other" general qualifications. 72% of Italian midwives declared to work and, in particular, in a "III level point of birth" (35%), "II level point of birth" (25%), "I level point of birth" (17%), or in "private health facilities" (4%), in "professional offices" (6%) or "counseling ambulatories" (5%). 46% of the English midwives who participated in the study worked in hospitals; 21% as employees of the NHS in territorial structures. 12% worked in birth centers and 11% had a private profession. There was a statistically significant difference between Italian and English Midwives, for all the macro areas (except for the first), with better results for English Midwives. CONCLUSION: English Midwives tend to consider their professional role and their professional skills more acknowledged and appreciated than Italian Midwives. Actually Italians tend to be not very satisfied. However, the Midwives of both countries feel very close to women and have the same conception of themselves and of their profession.