**5. Conclusions**

The Place © model has helped us to consider how and where midwives are located: in the sociological sense of the status and also place as a cumulative process of professional learning, a widening horizon which combines learning in and from the local and the global. For student midwives in particular, this provides a unique interdisciplinary lens through which to consider not only the beginning of their professional journey but also how their status and continuing professional learning might evolve, including ways that are less than professional. Other models of professionalism do not map the dystopian pitfalls in ways which encourage them to proactively shape their learning trajectories. The status of midwifery is important not for status sake itself but rather for the opportunity that status and regard a fford the profession to influence healthcare policy, drive optimum standards for education and practice, and further develop the evidence base through high quality interdisciplinary collaborative research. The need for the recognition and support for midwives to have continuing professional development opportunities in order to best meet the needs of the women and babies they care for is clear. However, while there is evidence to support the assertion that care provided by professional midwives leads to improved outcomes for women and babies [4], it is also known that some women have no access to midwives (often not by choice), there are midwives who are precarious professionals, career-long proto-professionals or those midwives who have become de-professionalized. The reasons for midwives remaining as proto-professionals and becoming de-professionalized are varied but given the need to provide women, her baby and family with the optimum quality of care and the ongoing challenges with recruitment, there is a need to find way to shift all midwives towards

the high status, high learned professional. For those women who have 'no midwife', WHO [70] recognizes the need for "Competent, motivated human resources" as one of the eight domains of the WHO framework for the quality of maternal and newborn health care. Globally, midwives need to continue to work closely with women and to use the evidence base that demonstrates their effectiveness in the provision of high-quality maternity care and outcomes to influence and encourage interprofessional collaboration across the increasingly complex topography of multi professional and agency maternity care.

In the UK, the NMC is currently consulting on new education standards and proficiencies for the Future Midwife, looking towards 2030 in order to forward plan education that will prepare midwives to meet the needs of the woman, baby and families of the next decade and beyond. This is a challenge as the diversity and complexity of the childbearing women needs to be balanced with the normal physiology of childbirth. In all of this, it is important to consider what matters to midwives. How best can the profession of midwifery continue to attract bright, articulate and 'heartstrong' individuals to not only become a compassionate, skilled and professional midwife but to continue to be one throughout their professional career. We know that midwives value the support of their managers and colleagues as a way of minimizing the fear factor and maximizing their potential to support women to achieve optimal outcomes [71]. After all, uniquely amongs<sup>t</sup> the professions, the most fundamental place of midwives is enshrined in the name—midwife meaning 'with woman' and the Place Model © has moved beyond this intimate scale to permit a broader mapping with regard to status and professional learning both nationally and internationally.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Conflicts of Interest:** No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
