Midwifery.jpg (Photo : Reuters)
China's National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC) is encouraging universities to include midwifery courses in their programs to address the gaping lack of qualified midwives in the country.
The NHFPC, China's top health authority, said on Tuesday that it is coordinating with the Ministry of Education to implore higher education institutions to open majors in midwifery and recruit students into the course in order to help deal with the shortage, according to China.org.
China had about 460,000 midwives, gynecologists and obstetricians in 2012, which comprises only 59 percent of the total demand for professionals in the field, according to a new report released by the NHFPC in collaboration with the United Nations Fund China (UNFPA) and the World Health Organization (WHO).
The report, titled "A Universal Pathway, A Woman's Right to Health," also cited 72 other countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America that are suffering from an insufficiency in the midwifery workforce.
"Midwives make enormous contributions to the health of mothers and newborns and the well-being of entire communities," said Arie Hoekman, UNFPA representative to China.
China has an average of only three midwives for every 100,000 people, said Pang Ruyan, deputy chairwoman of China Maternal and Child Health Care Association.
In comparison, Sweden, Britain and the Philippines have 70, 63 and 45 midwives, respectively, for every 100,000 people in their population.
"Scarcity of midwives in China is greater than many other developing countries," said Pang. "We have conducted an investigation at a hospital, which completes about 5,000 birth deliveries a year, but the hospital only has two midwives to finish all the work."
With the government easing its family-planning policy such that more families are allowed to have two children, 2 million more childbirths are expected every year, which necessitates more midwives, according to Zhang Yang, deputy head of the international department of the NHFPC.
With this new phenomenon, officials are resorting to the creation of midwifery majors in universities.
"We have received applications from many other universities to establish the major, and hopefully in the future more universities will offer midwifery education," Zhang said.
Fudan University in Shanghai, Tianjin Medical University in Tianjin and six other universities across China have included the major this year and will start accepting midwifery students in 2015.
