ABSTRACT
Events such as the advent of the National Health Service, with its increased hospitalisation, and the envisagement of earlier, and ever earlier, discharge, forced the Midwives Board and the Ministry of Health to consider the place of the midwife in this changing society, and to examine the problem of how to retain such a valuable and key care provider as the midwife when circumstances and policies were fragmenting her vital role. Some of the patients were found to be receiving antenatal care from the hospital, the midwife, the local-authority clinic and from a general practitioner-obstetrician, while at the same time receiving general medical care from their own general practitioner. The conveyor-belt system obviously fragmented the care for the mother, and contracted and specialised the role of the individual midwife in that she became a ward midwife giving antenatal or postnatal care, or a Deliveiy Unit midwife concerned with labour and birth.
