Midwifery capacity building in Papua New Guinea: Key achievements and ways forward.

Background: Papua New Guinea has some of the poorest health outcomes in the Asia-Pacific region. Maternal mortality is unacceptably high and there is a severe midwifery shortage requiring a quadrupling of the workforce.

Aim: This paper outlines the findings of an evaluation of the Maternal Child Health Initiative (MCHI) (2012-2013) to determine key factors contributing to maternal health workforce strengthening.

Conflicting contexts: midwives' interpretation of childbirth through photo elicitation.

Introduction: This study seeks to explore midwives' perceptions about childbirth and in particular their beliefs about normality and risk. In the current climate of increasing interventions during labour, it is important to understand the thought processes that impact on midwifery care in order to examine whether these beliefs influence midwifery clinical decision-making.

Method: 12 Midwives who worked in a variety of metropolitan hospitals in Sydney, Australia were interviewed about how they care for women during labour.

Collaborative approaches towards building midwifery capacity in low income countries: a review of experiences.

Objective: to explore collaborative approaches undertaken to build midwifery education, regulation and professional association in low income countries and identify evidence of strategies that may be useful to scale-up midwifery to achieve MDG 5.

Design: an integrative review involving a mapping exercise and a narrative synthesis of the literature was undertaken. The search included peer reviewed research and discursive literature published between 2002 and 2012.