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NEWS RELEASE Contact: 0439 875 441MIDWIFERY CARE SOLUTION TO OBSTETRIC SHORTAGES Women and their partners, and Western Australian taxpayers, are being short changed in maternity services. Instead of high quality integrated maternity services offering the choice of either primary midwifery or obstetric care, maternity services are failing to deliver real options of care. The Western Australian branch of Maternity Coalition and its affiliate groups call on the WA government to consider the evidence based options for maternity services offered in the recently released "Implementing NMAP in WA". This paper provides a blue print for maternity services in Western Australia, addressing issues recently highlighted in the media, particularly claims made about the shortage of obstetricians and the potential consequences for women. Fortunately, Western Australia has a workforce of professional midwives with the expertise to provide primary care for healthy women with normal pregnancies, including referral to specialist medical attention as required. The lack of opportunity to provide primary midwifery care is only hindered by a lack of creative thinking by the Minister for Health and his department. "Utilising the full scope of midwifery practice would relieve the burden on obstetricians, and create real choices for women. This in turn, would ensure that women could access a specialist medical practitioner when they required one. In most cases, women can be ideally cared for by midwives, as recommended by the World Health Organisation", says Mary Murphy, midwife and Maternity Coalition member. Recent media reports that current maternity services are not providing good dollar value for the taxpayer fail to address the real issues. As long as specialist obstetricians continue to provide care to the majority of healthy women it will at a far greater cost, and with no demonstrable improvement in outcomes, than midwives providing the same care. Plentiful evidence, including the Douglas report, shows that the ongoing problems of WA maternity services continue despite huge resource allocations by the current and previous WA governments. This occurs because the resources in maternity services are targeted inappropriately."Continuing to provide specialist medical care to healthy women with normal pregnancies is equivalent to bypassing a general practitioner and requiring all people to seek specialist medical attention for their various conditions" says Tracy Reibel, spokesperson for the Maternity Coalition. "At a time when we are seeking the most appropriate and cost effective options for providing health care, it is ludicrous that the only option that women have is obstetric care in public or private health system. This equates to no choice – despite all the rhetoric over the past twenty years of the need to provide choices."
An umbrella organisation committed to the advancement of best practice maternity care National Secretariat– PO Box Blackburn 1190 VIC 3130 ABN 82 691 324 728 |
