Betty’s Lifetime’s dedication to delivery of darlings as midwife at Royal Hospital for Women, Randwick

BETTY Michie can remember when midwives provided a mobile home delivery service by riding their bicycles to clients’ houses.

Betty Michie with 4 hour old Mithat Sema. Betty has been delivering babies at the Royal Hospital for Women for almost 44 years. Although officially retired, she remains on the hospitalÕs casual midwifery pool.

BETTY Michie can remember when midwives provided a mobile home delivery service by riding their bicycles to clients’ houses.

“I was in England at the time, I went to the UK to do midwifery training in 1954. We did home birth midwife services and rode on bicycle, we didn’t have cars like we do now,” she said.

Originally a registered nurse, the Bondi Junction resident became a midwife because “I got a lot of satisfaction due to the autonomy which didn’t exist in the nursing field”.

Mrs Michie was at the Royal Hospital for Women, Randwick, to celebrate International Midwife’s Day, hosted yesterday.

Betty Michie with 4 hour old Mithat Sema. Picture: Danny Aarons.

She has been helping to deliver babies at that hospital alone for 44 years. Before that she worked around the world in Kuwait, Hong Kong, Mexico and Malaysia­.

She never kept count of exactly how many babies she has helped deliver, but it would be “many thousands”. “It could have been as much as 10 or as little as three a week,” she said.

Given her more than 60 years in the job, she would have delivered at least 6000 babies all across the world.

Although officially retired, she remains on the hospital’s casual midwifery pool, is the hospital’s most ‘senior’ employee, and is regularly on shift helping to welcome more newborns.

She said she still relished the rewarding and challenging nature of the role.

“The satisfaction is enormous,” she said, “I and every other midwife get letters from our patients, saying ‘we could not have done this without you’ which is not true, of course,” she said.

“It is a moment in a woman’s life when she is very vulnerable, it is an extremely­ emotional time, they’re in pain and you have to get them to trust you quickly, that was a challenge I enjoyed about the job.”