People love to say midwives “just sit there” during labour. That throwaway line misses the point and it misses the skill. We’re joined by Georgina “Gina” Voss, a midwife of 30 years whose career spans emergency nursing, maternity governance, FGM clinical work, and a PhD focused on what one-to-one labour support truly looks like in real birth rooms.
Gina shares the moments that shaped her practice: learning to trust intuition when a patient looks fine but something feels wrong, being mentored by fiercely autonomous midwives who protect the birth space, and seeing how quickly normal birth can be disrupted when systems don’t support midwife-led care. We also explore her work on supporting women with female genital mutilation (female genital cutting) and what good care requires, from using clear respectful language to understanding why deinfibulation should be the first action for women with type III FGM, plus the practical postnatal details clinicians too often miss.
Her ethnographic research takes us behind the door, across home births and midwife-led units, including the relationship-building needed to be invited in, the ethics of being a clinician-researcher, and the constant balancing act that can look like “doing nothing” from the outside. We finish by zooming out to midwifery education and workforce development, including Gina’s work helping to build a midwifery degree in the UAE aligned with International Confederation of Midwives competencies, and her advice for midwives who want careers in clinical practice, research, leadership, and governance.
If you care about safe maternity care, midwifery continuity of care, one-to-one support in labour, and respectful women-centred practice, this one will stay with you. Subscribe, share with a colleague, and leave a review so more people find the work midwives do when it matters most.
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