Midwifery Basics: Assessing students

Midwifery Basics: Mentorship 4
Mentorship: is the fourteenth series of ‘Midwifery basics’ targeted at practising midwives. It aims to provide information to raise awareness of the impact of the work of midwives on student learning and ultimately on women’s experiences and encourages midwives to seek further information through a series of activities. In this the fourth article Julie Parkin and Joyce Marshall consider some of the key issues related to the responsibility of the sign off mentor in the process of assessing student midwives’ competence in clinical practice.
Scenario
Suzanne is practising on labour ward and is mentoring Emily, a second year student midwife. She is concerned that at the end of her first week Emily does not appear to be making the transition to being a second year student as she still requires close supervision and direction, and is struggling to communicate with women and their birth partners