Exploring the value of group supervision in midwifery: Part 1
Statutory supervision has been a feature of midwifery practice in the UK since 1902. As part of statutory supervision, all midwives meet with their named Supervisor of Midwives (SoM) to review their practice over the previous year and to confirm their competence to practise in the coming year. A new Future Proofing Model of Supervision in Wales was launched in August 2014 (Ness and Richards, 2014) and the annual one to one supervisory meetings were replaced with group supervision meetings, based on an action learning approach (Machin and Pearson, 2014) With the impending withdrawal of statutory supervision of midwifery in the UK, this paper explores the wider issue of clinical supervision and group supervision; part 2 (to follow in a future issue) will present the findings from several sets of data exploring the value of group supervision in midwifery in Wales.