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Safe, Quality Midwifery Care

Led by Professor Sara Bayes and Professor Jyai Allen, the key priorities for this group include:

  • Optimising the health and well-being of childbearing women pre-conception, through pregnancy, during birth, and postpartum.
  • A robust, sustainable and appropriately skilled midwifery workforce contributing to effective, efficient and respectful maternity care.
  • Methods for timely implementation of evidence-based innovation into midwifery practice.

Our current research themes are:

  • Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health
  • Regional, remote and rural health
  • Mental Health (psychological & socioecological determinants)

Attractive Midwifery Practice and Learning Environments Research and Innovation Laboratory (AMPLE Lab)

With minimal resources, midwives can provide safe births, antenatal, and postnatal care, provide contraception, comprehensive abortion care, and care for survivors of gender-based violence, support breastfeeding, ensuring newborns receive safe, clean, and reliable nutrition, and educate and prepare communities with the knowledge and tools they need to stay safe and healthy during emergencies. However, there is a global shortage of these invaluable health professionals, and the prediction is that the world will need at least 750,000 more midwives if essential sexual and reproductive health care needs are to be met.

The causes of the shortage are complex, but many are modifiable, including ensuring that the environments in which midwives practice and learn support their needs – in other words, that they are attractive to them.

Midwife researchers at the Edith Cowan University School of Nursing and Midwifery, together with external local, national and international associates, have been intensely focused on discovering, testing and implementing solutions to the midwifery workforce crisis in recent years. Since May 5th 2025, this work has been supported by The Attractive Midwifery Practice and Learning Environments Research and Innovation Laboratory (AMPLE Lab).

Led by internationally recognised and multi-award-winning midwifery workforce researcher Professor Sara Bayes, The AMPLE Lab brings the current and future midwifery retention projects and project partners together in a dedicated virtual space. The AMPLE Lab's purview is essentially to help keep midwives in midwifery, and it's emblem - a cornucopia, or horn of plenty, filled with midwives - represents the Lab's vision, which is that there will be at least 1 million more midwives worldwide by 2030, and underpins its mission, which is to support the attainment of  ('Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages'), specifically Targets 3.1, 3.2, 3.7 and 3.8.

For further information, kindly contact Professor Sara Bayes.

Midwifery Student Peer Debriefing Guide

Check out the our latest resource which was created after a recent study identified that Midwifery students who witness traumatic events at childbirth need increased and specific support to help overcome the negative consequence: Midwifery Student Peer Debriefing Guide

Journal articles

2024
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