The Senate Inquiry into the National Registration and Accreditation Scheme for Doctors and other Health Workers is underway. The Committee is due to report by 18 June 2009.
The first 90 submissions have been published electronically at the inquiry site, and others will be added as they are processed. The Report will also be available at this site.
As readers of this blog know, independent midwives had hoped that, as an outcome of the Maternity Services Review late last year, our government would provide indemnity insurance for midwives, to enable us to continue private practice after 1 July next year. [Check the blog archive for this past January and February]
The Report of the Maternity Services Review failed to recommend insurance for midwives, which probably means that independent midwifery will cease to exist after 1 July 2010. The Report recommends passing the buck to a process that "could support an expanded role for appropriately qualified and skilled midwives, within collaborative team-based models" - ignoring the fact that appropriately qualified and skilled midwives simply want to do midwifery. We don't need to expand our roles to induction of labour, or to being some sort of mini-doctors.
The Report also made pronouncements that could remove what little access women currently have to homebirth:
"In recognising that, at the current time in Australia, homebirthing is a sensitive and controversial issue, the Review Team has formed the view that the relationship between maternity health care professionals is not such as to support homebirth as a mainstream Commonwealth-funded option (at least in the short term)."
The potential losers in this sad saga are not only midwives, and the midwifery profession, but also the women who hope to have a midwife who will accompany them through their most basic and primal journeys, in giving birth to their children.
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