WORKING AS A COORDINATOR MIDWIFE IN A TERTIARY ...

At the end of the labour there is the woman and she is the one who has to carry
the canvas of her experiences.
The coordinator holds the tension for the sake of the woman.
This leads on to Jane’s story:
We had a first year registrar who had been employed at our unit for three weeks
and he was on nights. I thought “Great I’m in for a good night here!” considering
I didn’t know who he was, where he’d come from or what his practice was like. It
was some ungodly hour of the morning about 3am, a 16 year old was labouring.
She was doing alright but her baby had other ideas with quite dramatic foetal
heart decelerations. The registrar, to give him his due, had been ringing the
consultant every hour. The consultant came in. I was busy because I had my own
patient load as well as being the coordinator. Next minute I know, she is heading
off down to theatre for a caesarian section. I disagreed with this and believed it
was the wrong decision. The registrar was too junior to know what was going on.
I challenged the consultant. I was very blunt with her and said “I think you’re
making the wrong decision, we need to talk about this”.
The girl was on the caesar table about to have a spinal put in, so I told the
anaesthetist he had to stop. I said “I think you’re making a mistake. I think in this
instance you need to site epidural and not a spinal, to get her comfortable. This
was a few years ago before we were doing pH’s as a more standard procedure. I
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