NHS England lost 1,669 midwives aged 34 or younger during 2025-26. They made up 57% of the 2,949 midwives of all ages who resigned, according to figures reported by the Guardian on Monday. [1]
The Department of Health and Social Care answered with a different number: a record 25,500 full-time-equivalent midwives were working in the NHS. It also pointed to 1,000 additional roles backed by GBP10 million. [1]
Both figures can be true. One describes the workforce present at a point in time. The other describes people leaving during a year. A large bath can remain full while the drain widens, provided the tap runs fast enough. Patients still need to know whether experienced staff stay where care is delivered.
The gap matters before the total begins falling. Recruitment can replace a badge number faster than a ward replaces judgment, mentoring and trust built across repeated shifts.
The leak is youngest in the middle
The 1,669 younger leavers included 205 people under 25, 655 aged 25 to 29 and 809 aged 30 to 34. The total was 59% above the 1,051 younger midwives reported as leaving in 2014-15. [1]
Those raw counts do not supply the risk of departure by themselves. Age groups contain different numbers of workers. The Guardian reported that 14.6% of midwives aged 25 to 29 and 16.6% of those aged 30 to 34 left in 2025-26, compared with roughly 10% across the whole workforce. [1]
That denominator changes the story. The largest age-band count need not have the highest exit rate, and neither tells a trust how many shifts went uncovered. A national departure rate also cannot establish that one maternity unit was unsafe or that one patient's care suffered.
The Guardian and union officials connect the exits to burnout, understaffing, missed breaks and unpaid hours. Hannah Leonard of the Royal College of Midwives said too many younger staff were burning out within a few years of qualifying. [1] That is a serious account from a workforce representative. It is not an individual causal finding for all 1,669 departures.
Midwives can resign for retirement-inapplicable reasons that still vary: another NHS role, private or overseas work, reduced hours, family care, illness, education or departure from the profession. The reported figures do not publish that distribution. Burnout is therefore an attributed explanation requiring reason-for-leaving and follow-up data.
Students are a separate population
The article also reports that 3,565 people began midwifery degrees in 2021 and 2,725 graduated in 2024. The difference is 840, or about 24% of the starting group. [1]
It is tempting to add those 840 students to the 1,669 NHS leavers and announce one pipeline failure. That would combine people who had not entered the NHS workforce with employees who did. It would also assume that every person absent from the 2024 graduation count permanently abandoned the degree.
Some may have withdrawn. Others may have paused, transferred or graduated later. The two parliamentary answers establish a starting group and an on-schedule graduation group. A proper education ledger needs individual status, institution, reason, timing and eventual qualification before "did not graduate in 2024" becomes permanent non-completion.
The distinction matters because the remedies differ. Students may need financial support, placement quality and protected learning time. Working midwives may need staffing ratios, predictable hours, safe caseloads, development and a reason to remain. Recruiting another class cannot repair a workplace that loses people soon after qualification.
A record total can hide local fragility
The department said the full-time-equivalent workforce had grown by 2,000 since Labour took office in July 2024. [1] Full-time equivalence is useful because it accounts for hours rather than counting every worker as one identical unit. It still says nothing by itself about regional distribution, specialty, experience, vacancies, sickness or agency coverage.
A national record could coexist with a trust that cannot fill a night rota. An increase in new roles could coexist with a loss of mentors. A service could gain total hours while losing continuity if departures cluster among recently trained staff. None of those local outcomes is established by the national article; each is a question the next release should answer.
The documented X search returned no usable status. Claims that social media saw an exodus, dismissed the figures or linked them to particular safety failures remain unobserved. The mainstream record is valuable precisely because its numbers can be separated instead of compressed into one mood.
The next useful table would follow entrants, employees and leavers without mixing them. It would show headcount and full-time equivalents by age, trust and specialty; annual departures and reasons; returns and moves; student pauses and later completions; vacancies, workload and patient outcomes.
It should also separate resignation from leaving the profession. A midwife who changes trusts creates a local vacancy without disappearing from national capacity; one who leaves nursing entirely changes both records. Retention policy needs to know which happened.
Until then, 25,500 is not a rebuttal to 1,669. The record workforce describes scale. The younger departures describe retention. Maternity care depends on both.
-- NORA WHITFIELD, Chicago