The state of professionalisation of midwifery in Belgium: A discussion paper.

AIM: To describe the state of the professionalisation of midwifery in Belgium, and to formulate recommendations for advancing the midwifery profession. METHODS: A descriptive overview of maternity care in Belgium and the professionalisation of midwifery through an analysis of relevant policy and academic texts, underpinned by Greenwood's sociological criteria for a profession: (1) own body of knowledge, (2) recognised authority, (3) broader community sanctions, (4) own code of ethics and (5) professional culture sustained by formal professional associations. From these insights, recommendations for advancing the midwifery profession in Belgium are formulated. FINDINGS: Current strengths of the professionalisation of midwifery in Belgium included unified midwifery education programmes, progress in midwifery research and overarching national documents for guiding midwifery education, practice and regulation. In contrast however challenges, such as the limited recognition of midwives' roles by its clientele, limitations of midwives' competencies and autonomy, lacking development of advanced roles in maternity care practice and a lack of unity of the organisation and its members, were also identified. Based on these, recommendations are made to strengthen Belgian midwifery. CONCLUSIONS: Recommendations for advancing the midwifery profession in Belgium includes in particular increasing public awareness of midwives' roles and competencies, implementing the full scope of midwifery practice and monitoring and advancing this practice. Thus, professional autonomy over both midwifery practice and working conditions should be enhanced. United midwifery organisations, together with women's groups, other maternity care professionals and policy-makers as equal partners are key to bring about changes in the Belgian maternity care landscape

Adaptation to Variegated Scenes and Colour Constancy

For a visual system to possess colour constancy across varying illumination, chromatic signals from a scene must remain constant at some neural stage. We found that photoreceptor and opponent-colour signals from a large sample of natural and man-made objects under one kind of natural daylight were almost perfectly correlated with the signals from those objects under every other spectrally different phase of daylight. Therefore, in scenes consisting of many objects, the effect of illumination changes on specific colour mechanisms can be simulated by shifting all chromaticities by an additive or multiplicative constant along a theoretical axis. When the effect of the illuminant change was restricted to specific colour axes, thresholds for detecting a change in the perceived colours in a scene were significantly elevated in the presence of spatial variations along the same axis. Probe-flash threshold curves revealed that adaptation to variegated scenes is qualitatively different from independent adaptation to the constituents or to the space-average, but is similar to adaptation to prolonged temporal modulation (Shapiro and Zaidi, 1992 Vision Research32 2065 – 2076), which would be caused by small eye-movements across object boundaries. The data are consistent with a ‘response equalisation’ model, which modifies the response function of each mechanism to match the cumulative frequency distribution of its inputs (Zaidi and Shapiro, 1993 Biological Cybernetics69 415 – 428). In a variegated scene, correlations between spatially local chromatic signals across illuminants, and adaptation caused by eye movements across spatial variations, help the visual system to attenuate the perceptual effects due to changes in illumination. </jats:p