WORKING AS A COORDINATOR MIDWIFE IN A TERTIARY ...

When I go off duty, I forget about work. I have reached a point that things wind
me up too much and I won’t fight other people’s battles. It’s survival, it really is. I
feel I am fighting everybody’s battles just to coordinate a shift.
There is a sense that like Jane, Sally has created a wall to divide her work and her non
work lives so she can walk away from her workplace ‘battlefield’ and mentally take
herself to a different place when she leaves delivery suite. She needs to be able to
mentally move from the ‘lived space’ of delivery suite which she finds so demanding to
her ‘lived space’ away from that workplace; she needs to leave her coordinator role at the
door and become the woman who she ‘is’ as she walks away.
Is working in a battlefield sustainable? Smythe & Young (2008) write about the
responsibilities of independent midwives whereby “the role and life of an independent
midwife oozes with the possibilities of stress” (p.13). What of DHB midwives? Sally
reveals her stress levels as a coordinator midwife are also significant. How does she
‘wind down’ when she leaves delivery suite? She has not shared this information so we
do not know.
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