On May 5, Malta joins countries worldwide to celebrate the International Day of the Midwife.

The Malta Midwives Association (MMA) was established in 1974 and works towards enhancing midwives’ professional knowledge and practice to support childbearing women, children and families. As an organisation, MMA is affiliated with the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM), which is celebrating its centennial anniversary this year. This is so much more than an organisational achievement.

This momentous landmark is an opportunity to acknowledge the origins of the global confederation of midwives, ICM, while celebrating and exploring the next 100 years of ICM and what it means for global women’s, adolescents’, children’s and families’ health, especially if midwives received the enabling environment they deserve. This is the crux of ICM’s vision of a future world where every childbearing woman has access to a midwife’s care for herself and her newborn.

MMA is also affiliated with the European Midwives Association.

Locally, the International Day of the Midwife is also a celebration and an acknowledgment of how far we have come with the first formal midwifery education from the 17th century (Savona Ventura, 2009) to the establishing of a direct-entry midwifery programme within the Institute of Health Care, University of Malta in 1990. Education of midwives in Malta continued to evolve locally to a BSc (Hons), Master’s and also PhD levels (Borg Xuereb, 2021).

Additionally, as expected over the years, pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum care have changed dramatically with the shift from a mainly community-based pregnancy care and confinement to a hospital-based maternity care with a thriving postnatal community care.

In recent years, we have witnessed the emergence of pertinent global debates launched by relevant bodies discussing the importance of rationalising the use of interventions in healthcare in general. A simultaneous development is recognised in maternity care and there seems to be a turn towards re-conceptualising pregnancy and childbirth as being a largely health-generating process (Renfrew et al. 2013).

Midwives do much more than support women to birth babies

ICM (2021) has published a policy brief (developed with support from Ariadne Labs), which defines an enabling environment for midwives as “one that supports the infrastructure, profession and system-level integration needed for midwives to effectively practise their full scope of work”.

Midwives do much more than “support women to birth babies”. Midwives provide accessible, appropriate, equitable and high-quality sexual, reproductive, maternal, newborn and adolescent health (SRMNAH) care across the childbirth continuum and across sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR).

According to the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), there is an urgent need for SRMNAH care by professional midwives, yet, this is not presently supported within many health systems. Midwives are a cost-effective and essential solution to improve health outcomes and experiences for women and newborns.

Sustaining an enabling environment requires the need to scale up midwife-led continuity of care and provide continuity across the continuum of SRMNAH care (ICM, 2021). Yet, the majority of countries across the globe encounter barriers in developing and sustaining the enabling environment required to scale midwife-led continuity of care.

Professional midwives must be present in the care of clients during the pre-conception, pregnancy, birth and postpartum period. Our role is to provide care that is evidence-based, holistic, physiological and client-orientated. A maternity service with these attributes will provide high-level quality care and great satisfaction among our clients.

MMA, as an organisation must advocate, advance and mobilise evidence-based midwifery knowledge and practice, to ensure that the future years are even more monumental for midwives, women, newborns and their families. As midwives, we shall strive to explore issues related to identity, race, gender, ability and inclusion as a way of capturing the pulse of our local community.