Pregnant Australian women are missing out on ‘crucial’ maternity care

PUBLIC hospital maternity wards are so overstretched women have to wait until halfway through their pregnancy to get an appointment.

EXCLUSIVE

PUBLIC hospitals that deliver 73 per cent of Australia’s babies are so overstretched more than a third of women can’t get an antenatal appointment in the first 14 weeks of their pregnancy.

And fewer than one in ten women are getting access to continuity of care with the same doctor or team of midwives.

The crisis has been revealed as a storm is brewing over new national guidelines that govern the care of mums and babies which have been drawn up without the advice of a single obstetrician or general practitioner.

Even the College of Midwives has been shut-out of the committee which drew up the National Framework for Maternity Services due to be launched next week.

Maternity Choices which represents pregnant women says maternity care in Australia is in crisis but the framework does not address shortcomings in the system hurting mums and babies.

“At the moment there are lots of women turning up who have seen 10 different people who have told them ten different ways to have a baby and they turn up to the hospital in labour and are seen by people who they have never met before,” says the president of the Australian College of Midwives Professor Caroline Homer.

Women are having their babies delivered by strangers Picture: iStock

The outrage follows the Bacchus Marsh Hospital scandal where a review found 11 cases of avoidable newborn and stillborn deaths.

Last year a newborn died and another was left brain damaged after laughing gas was incorrectly administered instead of oxygen at Bankstown-Lidcombe Hospital in Sydney’s southwest.

And this week ex-midwife Lisa Jane Barrett was charged with manslaughter over two homebirths more than five years ago.

A draft of the new National framework for Maternity Services circulated ahead of a consultation meeting scheduled for Friday does not set a target to improve access to early antenatal visits or reference the goal of continuity of care.

The Australian Medical Association and the Royal Australian College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists have vowed to ignore the plan instigated by state and federal health ministers.

The furore has reignited the war between doctors and midwives with doctors claiming while they were excluded from the review there were seven midwives on the 12 member review panel.

AMA president and obstetrician Dr Michael Gannon says “it’s like reviewing mental health care without including psychiatrists”.

AMA President Dr Michael Gannon is angry at the government’s maternity review process.

He’s worried many women are now going through an entire pregnancy without ever seeing an obstetrician and says the guidelines should require all women see an obstetrician at least once during their pregnancy, preferably in the first three months.

The president of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists Professor Stephen Robson says he is boycotting Friday’s meeting in protest.

“This is a monumental missed opportunity, and the women of Australia should feel ripped off.”

“I’ve heard the framework described as a rotting corpse but that’s not quite true. It’s just a corpse.”

The AMA says it was given just 24 hours notice to provide a submission to the process which it found out about by accident.

The college of midwives says “we had nothing to do with the working party and we don’t agree with the working party, we were never asked to participate”.

A spokeswoman for Queensland Health which is co-ordinating the development of the framework for the nation said the scope, consultation and methodological approach to developing the National Framework has been agreed collectively by the Commonwealth Government, and all states and territories through COAG.

“We want to get the balance right,” she said.

All major stakeholders had been invited to a meeting on Friday.

“There is still some work to do to finalise the framework, and this will not be completed by our initial deadline of 30 June,” she said.

Many women don’t get their ultrasound on time.

More than one in eight women can’t get access to antenatal care in a public hospital until halfway through their pregnancy even though screening ultrasounds are meant to be carried out at 11-12 weeks.

The college of midwives says there is an undersupply of midwives and there needs to be an entire rethink of how maternity care is delivered.

Instead of requiring pregnant women to go to hospital for monitoring visits midwives should be placed in local community health centres or shopping centres to provide services where women want them.

Pressure is mounting on public maternity services as high out of pocket expenses means the number of women giving birth in private hospitals has fallen by 10 per cent.