Urgent PI Summit

[STEPHEN FLINT]

The Hon. Senator Kay Patterson Minister for Health & Ageing Parliament House CANBERRA  ACT  2600 Dear Minister, Re National summit on health professional indemnity insurance I am writing in disbelief and indignation that at the National Summit on Professional Indemnity (PI) Insurance to be held on 23 April 2002 in Canberra; the following inequities are considered acceptable by your office and government;   1) The lose of PI by midwives is not even on the agenda!   2) Midwife and maternity consumer representatives have not been invited to participate at the National Summit on PI! This is regardless of the fact that midwives are the only profession so far in Australia to have lost access to PI (through inaccessible premiums) yet are not considered appropriate participants at the National Summit being orgsanised by your office! 3) The withdrawal of Midwives in Private Practice services affects more than 7,000 thousand Australian women and their families each year.  Yet again Maternity Consumer representatives have not been invited though are eager to participate.   4) The refusal to consider midwives and their clients as significant in this summit continues and increases the inequitable status quo of Australian Maternity Services and ignores the significance of the loss of midwifery care to not only the current but future state of these services. For evidence based practice obstetric research, 15 years of national, state and international reviews of maternity services  have all repeatedly shown that midwife-led care is safe, cost-effective, world best-practice and women's preferred care for childbearing. Thus your government continues to ignore these facts and accept the high costly levels of interventionist care experienced by most Australian families and the cumulative adverse effects of the medicalised childbirth contrary to your declarations that Australian families have access to world's best practice!   5) The Australian Health Ministers acknowledged the importance of this issue last September when they referred the problem of PI insurance for midwives to the AHMAC Medical Indemnity Working Group.  Yet, extraordinarily, we have information that suggests the Working Group has not considered the issue of PI for midwives in the report it is preparing for the May Health Ministers¹ meeting. or this Summit! As a member of the Australian Society of Independent Midwives and the Australian College of Midwives I ( and my Australian midwifery colleagues) strongly urge you to include access for midwives to affordable Professional Indemnity insurance on the agenda for the 23 April Summit, to not only invite but encourage the participation of suitable midwife and maternity consumer representatives in the determining of workable solutions to restore private midwifery services. This is particularly crucial in regional areas where childbirth services are rapidly being shut down and women have no option but to travel long distances to have their babies. To continue to maintain and increase the medical dominance of Australian Childbearing is contrary to the health and well being of this and future generations of Australians! Thus I look forward to midwife and maternity consumer representatives receiving an invitation to this summit and a commitment from your government to continue to correct the inequities in the provision of the Australian maternity services! Yours sincerely, Denise Hynd RM, RN, BApSc, IBCLC 10 April 2002 CC Meg Lees Democrat Health Spokesperson,       Stephen Smith  Labor Heatlh Spokesperson,         Senator B Brown