Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times Britain in the 1950s
By Sandra Trudgen Dawson
As I watched Call the Midwife, I recalled my own personal memories and relationship with the National Health System (NHS). I trained as a midwife in the late 1980s in one of the busiest (if not the busiest) inner city maternity hospitals in Britain. We delivered 8,000 babies a year. Midwifery training was highly competitive. The school admitted twelve students who had a minimum of one year experience as a registered nurse, three times a year. We trained in the school, the maternity hospital and the community. By the 1980s, all midwives in Britain went through similar eighteen month training and took national exams that included an oral examination in London in front of a Board of Examiners.
