Student midwives are told 'there's not enough jobs'

FIRST it was graduating nurses, new doctors and paramedics, and now midwives about to qualify from universities in Wales have been told there’s a shortage of jobs in the Welsh NHS.

- By ABBIE WIGHTWICK

As midwives near the end of their training in Wales, Health Education and Improvement Wales (HEIW) has told them there aren’t as many graduate jobs available as expected when they were taken on courses three years ago.

HEIW, the body tasked with calculating numbers the NHS in Wales needs to train, added that this is unlikely to change.

Applications for what graduate midwife entry vacancies there are, known as “graduate streamlining”, have also been delayed from March to April and now May.

Affected midwifery students are “angry and devastated” at the news.

Some claimed they were “virtually guaranteed jobs” when they first applied for midwifery degree courses in Wales as well as during the three years of training.

Swansea, Cardiff and Bangor universities, as well as the University of South Wales, run midwifery degree courses and are told by HEIW how many to run those courses for.

In its email to third years, HEIW told them: “fewer vacancies are currently available than in recent years”.