WORKING AS A COORDINATOR MIDWIFE IN A TERTIARY ...

I always had a yearning for travel so decided to travel to New Zealand where I branched
out in to community based nursing as a Plunket Nurse, a Public Health Nurse and then as
a Home Care Midwife. These were enriching years because I was living and working in
an area of poor socio economic conditions, within a community of predominantly Maori
and Pacific Island families. As a guest in homes, I was working autonomously,
holistically and inclusively with entire families. I learnt about the reality of life, health
and wellbeing away from hospitals and doctors’ surgeries.
I experienced the New Zealand childbirth model during my pregnancies in the early
1980s in a rural area where we queued outside the doctor’s surgery at a quarter to nine in
the morning for our ‘collective’ nine o’clock appointment on a ‘first come first served’
basis. The surgery door would be unlocked at nine o’clock and ten of us would be herded
in like sheep and then processed through the system with a practice nurse ‘doing’ the
urinalysis and blood pressure checks and the general practitioner ‘doing’ a palpation
resulting in us vacating the surgery within a speedy frame. When I questioned the doctor
about this process, he told me ‘there was no money in obstetrics’.
I enjoyed well active pregnancies and normal births. However I recall my childbirth
experiences with an absence of joy, of caring, or any sense of autonomy for me as a
woman. The doctor arived at full dilatation and episiotomies were routine. With my
second birth I was regarded as eccentric because I refused to be moved to the theatre to
birth and I wore my own clothes, I had music playing during the labour, I insisted on
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