Meeting the increasing need for training in obstetric medicine

As increasing numbers of women of child-bearing age enter pregnancy with chronic medical conditions and an increasing number are overweight or obese, the role of obstetric medicine expands as well. The challenge to safely prepare these women for pregnancy, care for them during pregnancy and develop plans for their long-term care will be enormous. We must be able to develop a workforce across disciplines to answer this need. In the latest UK Confidential Enquiries into Maternal Deaths,1 in which the individual deaths were reviewed in detail, ‘the assessors were struck by the number of health care professionals who appeared to fail to be able to identify and manage common medical conditions or potential emergencies outside their immediate area of expertise’. In this edition of the journal, we are pleased to publish ‘Validation of a Canadian Curriculum in Obstetric Medicine’. This is an instrument specific to Canadian Residency training that has had country-wide validation. In addition, there have been contributions from the North American and the International Society of Obstetric Medicine's work on an international curriculum, spearheaded by our UK editor-in-chief, Professor Catherine Nelson-Piercy, and by Professor Raymond Powrie of the USA.