Publish date: 3 May 2022
To celebrate International Day of the Midwife Lisa McQueen tells us more about her role as a fetal wellbeing lead midwife
I’m Lisa McQueen and I’m the fetal wellbeing lead midwife for the trust. I’ve been a midwife for 25 years now and started my training as soon as I left school. I’ve grown with the role and since having had my own child, my perspective on midwifery has changed and developed over the years.
In my role I’m responsible for making sure that the trust adheres to local and national guidance regarding monitoring the growth and wellbeing of babies. This involves training staff and reviewing cases so that we can learn and improve our service. The safety of mums and babies is at the heart of everything we do.
We have recently invested in new state of the art CTG machines which monitor babies’ heartbeats so I’ve been very busy building a training programme for midwives and medical staff to ensure our service runs safely and effectively. As well as helping to build training programmes, I often get the opportunity to work clinically (which is where all midwives love to be!) and it is an absolute pleasure taking care of mums and babies throughout their journey with us.
The most rewarding part of my job is seeing a new family being discharged from our wards, knowing that the care they have received has been safe, personalised and that most importantly, everyone is happy and healthy.
Midwifery is continuously evolving, even though the process of pregnancy and childbirth doesn’t change. The focus of the way we care for mums and babies has become much more personalised and more informative than it has ever been, and rightly so. I think it’s fantastic that we’re able to allocate our new mums their own midwife so they have a familiar face caring for them throughout their pregnancy journey.