News
"Midwife services still not available to city women - Local births up 20 per cent"
Tenille TellmanFriday, December 18, 2009
Medicine Hat women still do not have access to midwifery services eight months after the province began covering the costs.
Expectant mothers in cities like Calgary are facing waiting lists in excess of nine months — meaning only women with well-planned pregnancies need apply — and with no practicing registered midwives in Medicine Hat, access to the service is essentially impossible.
The situation is frustrating for Hatters like Michelle Maisonville, president of From Womb to Cradle Doula Services. After experiencing both a standard in-hospital child delivery and doula-accompanied medical childbirth, she knows she would want a third option.
“If I were to have another child, I’d want a midwife-attended home birth,” she said.
“Women really should have that opportunity to decide what’s best for them.”
But local women would not want to have to travel to Calgary to access this service, if they could get an appointment, she added.
According to the Alberta Association of Midwives, only about 10 new midwives have come to Alberta since government announced funding last April. The provincial health budget allotted funds for the province's 43 licensed midwives to handle 1,000 patients this year.
Individual midwives can only take 40 patients each year and approximately half of the licensed midwives are actually practicing.
In many ways, government put the cart before the horse, says Loree Siermachesky, managing editor of International Doula magazine and partner in Special Deliveries.
“We need midwives but the government hasn’t figured out how to train them,” she said, noting there are only 40 education spots available across Canada.
“I don’t think they understood the amount of women that really wanted that service.”
Siermachesky has been interested in the training for eight years but couldn’t justify seeking training in another country, only to return for another year of bridging training to ensure her education met Canadian standards.
A training program was to be offered through Mount Royal University but only the bridging program is currently on the books.
With delivery services reduced in some rural hospitals, the demand on the Medicine Hat Regional Hospital has increased by almost 20 percent. At the end of Nov. 2008, there were 1,158 total births recorded. At the end of Nov. 2009, there were 1,384.
The draw to midwifery services is among mothers who are becoming more educated about childbirth, she says.
“I think the philosophy has changed a bit, people are looking at birth as a natural event, not a medical emergency.”
While thankful for the medical interventions available in today’s society, Siermachesky says more moms prefer to access emergency treatment only when it is a true emergency that requires an obstetrician.
“When women feel empowered, birth goes better,” added Maisonville.
A big problem in not having midwifery services is an underground movement of “free births” where women so desperately want to deliver at home that they resort to risky, unassisted deliveries, said Siermachesky.
-With files from Canadian Press
