Midwives provide essential health care, supervising and assisting mothers in labour, monitoring the condition of the fetus and pregnancy and using their knowledge of drugs and pain management to help women through birth.

Midwives also give support and advice on the daily care of the baby, including breast feeding, bathing and making up feeds.

One of the recently introduced indicators for Millennium Development Goal 5, Improve Maternal Health, is the: Proportion of births attended by skilled health personnel.

Ensuring more trained midwives are available in primary health care systems around the world is critical to this.

Yet in many countries there is a chronic shortage of midwives, even in developed countries like England only 26 per cent of units have enough midwives for one-to-one care.