Celebrating our midwives - Cate Wetton

5 May 2021

We are celebrating our nurses, midwives and operating department practitioners (ODPs) in a two-week long celebration during May that takes in the international recognition days for each profession. Today we're putting the spotlight on our midwives, so it's over to Cate Wetton to tell us a bit about her role and profession.

Cate: I’m a community midwife team leader in Leeds, coming up for my second anniversary here. I qualified as a nurse in 1993 and after I experienced maternity services during my own pregnancy, I knew I wanted to be a midwife. And I’ve never looked back.

Our traditional role was to care for people in the antenatal and postnatal periods, but our community midwives are now rotating into the hospital to care for people when they are birthing their babies so that we can provide greater continuity. I’ve worked for a number of organisations and this really is the best service I have known. I am fortunate to work with some incredibly talented people and experience great leadership here and I’m proud to be a part of this service - women in Leeds genuinely do get good care. And whilst we might not always get it right, there’s a constant drive to do better and improve.

Midwife means ‘with woman’ and it’s a real privilege to be there to support women as they transition in life into being a mother. Every day I am amazed by the women I meet, they’re never at their strongest than when they are becoming mothers.

But I am focused on the men also. I did my dissertation on ‘The man’s experience of maternity care’. The man often gets overlooked and perhaps doesn’t always engage as much as we might like because we might be discussing areas that they don’t expect to be involved in.

This International Day of the Midwife focuses on encouraging midwives to come into the profession and then to stay. I’m definitely an advocate for that.