WORKING AS A COORDINATOR MIDWIFE IN A TERTIARY ...

‘I’m already overseeing three women with junior midwives, I am caring for a
woman, our staff are all deployed and we are running a caesar’,
at which point, she has to manage an unexpected emergency admission to delivery suite
with no midwife to care for the woman. All she can do is use her knowledge to prioritize
care:
I had to go in and say to the dad “right this is the story, we have no staff, we
actually don’t have anybody to look after you, I’m really sorry for that, there’s no
excuse but I’m being up front and honest with you.” He said “fine, that’s okay”.
I ran into Annie who was in a room with a woman to see how far off she was and
she’d just delivered the baby, so I grabbed Jan who is a registered nurse and put
her in the room with the couple. Then I put Jan in with Annie’s woman when the
placenta was out and I told Annie she was needed in the other room. I gave Annie
a quick run down, she went in to the couple and I went back into the office. Annie
must have only been in that room for four minutes when she rang a double bell.
The woman had a prolonged bradycardia, we rushed her down to theatre and
luckily she delivered on the table. It was all okay, and they’re like “thank you,
thank you”. And I thought “you have no idea how you just scraped by, by the
skin of your teeth”.
Harman (2007) writes “our current life is there before us as the hand we are forced to
play. The most we can do is try to work with the situation as we find it and every moment
however dull or horrible has its possibilities” (p.28). Sally knew there were no more staff
available to assist at that point and she recognized she was skating on thin ice but she had
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