WORKING AS A COORDINATOR MIDWIFE IN A TERTIARY ...

in a sustained way and are not interested or courageous enough to stand firm and
recognize midwives as different from nurses” (p.8). The New Zealand College of
Midwives have identified their recruitment and retention proposals for the midwifery
workforce in this article and acknowledge how invisible DHB midwife employees are in
some New Zealand DHBs.
Nurses in their general hospital working environments are usually caring for one patient
whereas midwives are simultaneously caring for a mother and her baby or babies. Flow
charts on paper and the reality of managing staffing shortages in the workplace can be
poles apart. The Safe Staffing / Healthy Workplaces project does however highlight
awareness and proposed action at government level regarding the gravity of workforce
issues for both the nursing and midwifery profession.
The Ministry of Health has published a draft form of the ‘Maternity Action Plan 2008-
2012’. Within this report there is acknowledgement of the need for planning “that builds
on current national health workforce initiatives to ensure the availability of a skilled
maternity workforce” (p.23). This plan reveals there are shortages of midwives and
obstetricians in New Zealand with an alarming shortage of professionals in rural and
provincial areas. The report also reveals there is an increasing and unsustainable reliance
on overseas midwifery and obstetric practitioners. Workforce shortages are attributed to
an aging workforce, recruitment difficulties, workforce retention problems and
insufficient numbers of midwives being trained in New Zealand. These workforce
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