Cobar Hospital without midwife, mums call for more services

Pregnant women in an outback community have lost access to their only midwife, with one driving 670 kilometres to give birth during the pandemic.

Outback mums forced to travel hundreds of kilometres to give birth and get blood test results have been dealt another blow after the only midwife in a western NSW town went on maternity leave and no replacement was found.

Women in Cobar, about 300 kilometres west of the closest public hospital they can give birth at in Dubbo, say they’re unable to understand why their town is being left without such a basic service.

Cobar mum Tiara Finn with baby Imogen who was born at John Hunter Hospital in Newcastle on September 14.

The dire lack of maternity services in western NSW has prompted Tiara Finn to give birth to her two children at John Hunter Hospital in Newcastle, 670 kilometres from Cobar.

“You’ve got to either go to your GP or Dubbo now for midwife checks,” she said.

“I just don’t see why it’s not a necessity out here.”

After growing up in Tweed Heads where she “had a hospital down the road”, Mrs Finn said she moved to Cobar 10 years ago with her husband Aaron, a local primary school teacher.

It wasn’t until falling pregnant with her first daughter Summer, 2, that Mrs Finn was able to fully comprehend how hard it was to be pregnant in the outback.

“You don’t have any option really, you either have a baby in Dubbo or wherever you want to go or you don’t have kids,” she said.

“We didn’t know anyone in Dubbo … you have to get there before your due date and if you go over you have to wait around so we didn’t really want to stay in accommodation for that long.

“We had friends in Newcastle so went and stayed there.”

The unused maternity section at the old Cobar Hospital which was demolished in 2019.

At the height of the latest Covid outbreak the Finn’s gave birth to their second daughter Imogen eight weeks ago, again in Newcastle.

“All of our family on the Tweed, Gold or Sunshine Coast and we would have had nobody to look after our daughter if we had her in Dubbo,” Mrs Finn said.

“I ended up being over there for about a month before we came back to Cobar.”

Despite the NSW Government opening a new hospital worth more than $15 million in Cobar in January 2020, Mrs Finn had to travel three hours to get an ultrasound at Bourke after she had a scare while pregnant with Imogen.

“When I was about 14 weeks along I had a little bit of bleeding and freaked out because that’s not normal,” she said.

“I went to Bourke and got a check, everything was fine … If there was an issue I know they can fly you to Dubbo but by the time they get the plane and you get in the plane it could be five hours before you get there so it is a bit of a worry if someone is having serious complications or it is a high risk pregnancy or something happens.

“It would be nice to have a doctor up at the hospital that’s on call for this kind of thing.”

NSW Health Minister Brad Hazard (right) celebrating construction of the new Cobar Hospital. Picture: NSW Government

For another Cobar couple Carissa and John Templeton, the lack of health services across western NSW has been an added pressure on top needing to undergo multiple rounds of IVF to have their children.

“We have pathology here but it’s not same day results so I remember on one occasion I had to drive to Dubbo for a blood test four times in one week because Cobar doesn’t have the capacity to offer the same day pathology results that were needed,” she said.

“We have great hospital staff, we are so blessed to have them but they can only work with what they’re given.”

Located 300 kilometres away, Dubbo Base Hospital is the closest place Cobar women can give birth. Picture: Ryan Young

Mrs Templeton is due to give birth to her second child in January and in June this year she presented to Cobar Hospital after having a scare.

“I waited two-and-a-half hours in the waiting room for a virtual doctor to get a referral to drive to Bourke to get a quick ultrasound but I was still waiting so I ended up just coming home thinking ‘I have a scheduled ultrasound in a couple of days, everything will be okay’ or if I was losing my baby there was nothing they could do anyway,” she said.

“If we had a midwife there … they would have been able to put a doppler on me and I would’ve known then and there that everything was okay.

“They do have someone that comes out to do ultrasounds, it’s either a couple of days a fortnight or a couple of days a month but there’s a waiting list, it’s not like Dubbo where you can ring up and they fit you in to an emergency spot. The nurses are fantastic at the hospital but they say ‘I can’t even check you because I’m not trained to do so’ and they really can’t be expected to cover the roles of nurse and midwife, it’s just not possible.”

The Western NSW Local Health District was contacted for comment but did not provide a response before deadline.

It’s understood attempts made to recruit a midwife at Cobar were unsuccessful.

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