I want to make it clear to everyone reading my blog that I think it is a big mistake to attach insurance to our registration. If we are competent practitioners then registration should be available to us.
Justine Caines thinks that insurance should be the woman’s right, and that we would be mad to ask that registration not be linked to insurance. That is fair enough if the insurance is hers to take out. A No Blame policy is a way a woman can get compensation for a problem from a home or hospital setting. I can guarantee that there would be a huge need from the hospital!!! An insurance for women.
Insurance that is being discussed with the government is for midwives, to ensure they only undertake the work that is set out to them and don’t actually work with women but defer at all times to a medical practitioner. Insurance doesn’t change risk, practice or outcome.
I feel powerless to do anything because negotiations are with the College of midwives and it appears Maternity coalition. The lead roles of both are taken by non midwives. It seems they will not support what is requested by the midwives who are privately practicing but some higher more knowledgeable dudes who claim it’s going to be all right.
As you can see I’ve already been fobbed off. I am sad that the college of MIDWIVES can not see that their job is to support midwives, not women, that is our job. The colleges job is to make sure that midwives can be with women on an on going basis.
Check out the AMA, they don’t constantly push the rights of patients they are on their soap boxes supporting their members at every turn.
I want to mobilise all the Independent midwives in the country so we can fly in to Canberra and lobby Nicola Roxon in person, and whoever else is seems we should see. I don’t know where to start with this. If anyone has ideas please let me know.
If we go down I want it to be after we had stood up for ourselves. I don’t want to go quietly letting people that I don’t agree with and who have no idea about independent midwifery speak on my behalf.
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I keep hearing that ACMI and friends believe there’s a secret deal between them and Roxon and that homebirth will be saved by being enshrined in loopholes. I don’t want my human rights dependant on a loophole and I don’t believe that a federal government needs to make secret deals with those who have no power anyway.
Let’s just face up to the fact that ACMI would rather sell out women and independent midwives in order to look like they’re going to gain some kind of parity of treatment with doctors. I’ve heard all about how homebirthers are just some tiny whiny minority and there’s plenty of other woman-centred care models in this country but anyone with half a brain knows that’s utter crap.
There’s homebirth, then there’s the rest. And while homebirth has some problems because of regulation and attacks on midwifery (about which MC and ACMI do well… um nothing??) it’s the closest thing we have to the kind of care women deserve and the kinds of jobs midwives should want if they’re really midwives and not obstetric nurses.
I don’t know what can turn this around but lickarsing RANZCOG and the AMA all this time obviously isn’t really paying off for women even if it’s going to mean a small number of midwives can prescribe synto as nicely as a doctor does.
Lord spare me from midwives like those!
Whenever women (remember them, everyone?) are asked, way more than can currently access homebirth would love to have a homebirth. That would make homebirth a way more usual option. Women aren’t stupid and plenty of us have realised that hospital birth is slice’n'dice and no one in government gives a toss about us. Regardless of how many women do, would or might want a homebirth, the fact is that any of us can walk into a hospital and ask for a caesarean for no reason at all and get it despite the huge cost to the community.
That’s what shows this is all about the power of doctors and that governments have no interest in providing women with appropriate care and services. Independent midwives and homebirthers aren’t getting representation in all this chair polishing that’s going on and thus it’s all morally bankrupt anyway.
Hi Lisa, I have been thinking about your post and what it means for independent midwives, while writing some stuff about midwifery for some study that I’m doing. It seems that we are heading for a similar situation as the US 20 years ago when much independent midwifery was outlawed/illegal or quasi-legal. Their Midwives Association of North America (MANA) is not connected to registration and is not disciplinary, but there for and by the midwives who operate by apprenticeship (and now also direct-entry) models of education and lots of suppport for practicing woman-led care and intuitive midwifery. Whereas CNM is another association of nurse-midwives, hospital trained. We have not had an official split like that here, and apart from the recent direct-entry training, most Australian midwives had nursing training before midwifery and certainly there has not been any apprenticeship type training. I am sure you know this already, my point is that maybe there needs to be mobilisation amongst midwives to create an organisation that supports what you and others are trying to do, like MANA or the Association of Radical Midwives in the UK? Especially if ACMI are not going to support you.