Mrs Pamela Okodogbe

Describe how Registered Midwives maintain professional and ethical practice

The purpose of this assignment is to describe how Registered Midwives (RM) maintains professional and ethical practice. Registered Midwives provide care in accordance with the methods and principles that support midwifery practice. This includes ethics principles (NMBI 2015).   Ethics is the means of putting into practice daily situation that is related to what is right in midwifery practice (Macdonald, and Magill-Cuerden 2011). Hence, ethics principles include self-sufficiency, beneficence, non-maleficence and fairness (Pairman et al. 2010).These ethics principles allied with the code of practice direct the methods of practice such as code of professional conduct and ethics for registered nurses and midwives. The code however consists of five principles which include respect for dignity of a woman, responsibility and accountability, confidentiality, collaboration with colleagues and quality of practice (NMBI 2014).
This assignment will focus on quality of practice to maintain midwifery practice. Quality of practice in midwifery means practicing safely, without causing harm to women and babies and being competent using best evidence-based practice (NMBI 2014). The terms; safe practice, without causing harm and competent are the key words of this definition and also the elements of quality of practice which will also be analyse in three different sub-headings on this assignment. To properly discuss the topic; literature searches using these terms were carried out on the following databases searching for articles published between 2008 and 2014.   The electronic databases used for gathering information were ProQuest ebrary, CINAHL and Science Direct.   Also, some websites and textbooks were used to find up to date information in regards to the above topic. Based on the research findings, quality of practice such as safe practice to prevent harm and build up skill to gain competency along...