If the needs of future midwifery practitioners are to be met it is essential that health-care education is evaluated to ensure that learning opportunities are relevant, dynamic and aligned with professional policy recommendations. In 2004, midwifery lecturers from Bournemouth University (BU) carried out an evaluation of four specific elements of the student practice and education experience wit...

We introduce skill chaining, a skill discovery method for reinforcement learning agents in continuous domains. Skill chaining produces chains of skills leading to an end-of-task reward. We demonstrate experimentally that skill chaining is able to create appropriate skills in a challenging continuous domain and that doing so results in performance gains.

Current concerns over reforming engineering education have focused attention on helping students develop skills and an adaptive expertise. Phenomenological guidelines for instruction along these lines can be understood as arising out of an emerging theory of thinking and learning built on results in the neural, cognitive, and behavioral sciences. We outline this framework and consider some of i...

BACKGROUND national and international trends have identified concerns over the ability of health and social care workforces in meeting the needs of service users. Attention has increasingly been drawn to problems of recruiting and retaining professionals within higher education; however data in relation to the midwifery profession is scant. AIM to examine the perceptions and experiences of mi...

BACKGROUND AND METHODS To guide achievement of the Millennium Development Goals, we used the Lives Saved Tool to provide a novel simulation of potential maternal, fetal, and newborn lives and costs saved by scaling up midwifery and obstetrics services, including family planning, in 58 low- and middle-income countries. Typical midwifery and obstetrics interventions were scaled to either 60% of t...

Observation in Grounded Theory and Ethnography: What are the Differences? Tahereh Fathi Najafi, Robab Latifnejad Roudsari, Hossein Ebrahimipour, and Narjes Bahri PhD Student in Reproductive Health, Student Research Committee, Department of Midwifery, School of Nursing and Midwifery, Mashhad University of Medical Sciences, Mashhad, IR Iran Associated Professor, Evidence-Based Care Research Centr...

Jamileh Farokhzadian, Golnaz Forughameri, Abbas Karami. Department of Community Health Nursing, School of Nursing and Midwifery, Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Kerman, Iran; Department of Community Health Nursing, School of Nursing and Midwifery, Kerman University of Medical Sciences, Kerman, Iran; MSc student of Nursing, School of Nursing and Midwifery, Kerman University of Medical Sci...

In 2015, the International Confederation of Midwives launched the Midwifery Services Framework: a new evidence-based tool to guide countries through the process of improving their sexual, reproductive, maternal and newborn health services through strengthening and developing the midwifery workforce. The Midwifery Services Framework is aligned with key global architecture for sexual, reproductiv...

There is a decrease in the number of new midwives, resulting from the shutdown of midwifery education program in hospitals due to a decrease in birthrate in the Republic of Korea. To solve this problem, the current medical laws on midwifery education system in Korea should be revised; nurse-midwifery specialist programs must be established in educational institutes with nursing programs. To sup...