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Maternity Coalition Press Releases
NEWS RELEASE - Sunday 12th
September 2004
MIDWIFERY 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."
Contact: 0439 875 441
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