Warning over midwife retirement 'time bomb'

Midwives in Scotland are getting older and the number of women have babies over the age of 35 is rising

The Royal College of Midwives has warned that Scotland is facing a retirement "time bomb".

About 40% of midwives are now in their 50s and 60s, compared with 30% only four years ago.

The Royal College of Midwives (RCM) said services were not currently under threat, but may not be safe in future.

The Scottish government said Scotland had the recommended midwife numbers and it would continue to ensure the right numbers of midwives were training.

The Royal College also said the number of younger midwives in Scotland was falling.

In its report, the RCM said:

• 56,725 babies were born in Scotland last year

• the number of births to women in their early 40s has been above 2,000 (2,075 in 2014) in every year since 2008

• 148 babies were born in Scotland last year to women aged 45 or above, representing a five-fold increase since 2000

• the percentage of staff aged 50 or more rose from 32% of the workforce in 2011 to 42% in 2014

• but there is not a shortage of midwives in Scotland.

The college's chief executive Cathy Warwick said that all women deserved the "very best care, regardless of the age at which they give birth".

She added: "Women have every right to give birth later in life, and we support that. But typically older women will require more care during pregnancy, and that means more midwives are needed."

"What worries me in particular is the retirement time bomb that our report unearths. Not only in England, but across the UK, we are not seeing enough new midwives being taken on."

'Important not to be complacent'

Scotland's Public Health Minister Maureen Watt said she welcomed the report and pointed out that NHS Scotland met the RCM's recommended midwife to birth ratio.

She added: "However, it is important not to be complacent and that is why we have developed a maternity workload and workforce planning tool, which is applied regularly within our maternity services.

"We have worked in partnership with the RCM to gather intelligence on our midwifery workforce profile and will be taking this forward with NHS Boards.

"We will continue working with our key stakeholders, including RCM, to ensure we have the right numbers of midwives in training and in the workforce and this year we increased the student midwife intake by 8%."

However, Scottish Labour's Richard Simpson said the NHS in Scotland was facing a "staffing time bomb" because of the "SNP's sticking plaster approach".

He added: "The SNP's handling of workforce planning has been an absolute disaster.

"Last week the experts at Audit Scotland exposed the extent of the problems in our NHS under the SNP government in Edinburgh as they have cut the health budget.

"These problems in our NHS did not appear overnight, they began on the first minister's watch. Under the SNP government NHS staff are undervalued, under resourced and under intolerable pressure."