Australian Private Midwives Association: New blogger

Saturday, October 9, 2010

New blogger

That's me at a rally outside the Health Minister's office

Hello, this is Joy Johnston.

I would like to introduce myself, as I have put my hand up to work with this blog. My blogs are perhaps the best way of telling you how I use this valuable medium.

Through the villagemidwife blog I share my own midwifery stories and make critical comment on current issues.

midwivesVictoria is a site I manage for the Midwives in Private Practice (MiPP) group, a collective of independent midwives in Victoria.

Private Midwifery Services is a more recent blog, in which I have addressed the very complex and often vexed issue of reform of maternity services, particularly as it has impacted on independent practice including homebirth.

My blogging experience goes back several years. On my blogger dashboard I have about a dozen sites, and there's a Word Prss quilt blog out there too! I use blogs as records that are maintained in a systematic fashion over time, and easily retrieved. A blog is like a magazine that, instead of having pages that you turn, has pages that continue on down the screen and into the past. The links on the side bar of the blog invite the reader to explore further. Documents and posters can be posted on the blog as images, and enlarged by a right click from the mouse.

Anyone who is older than about 40 will remember the pre-digital, pre-internet era. As a budding activist for maternity reform as recently as the early 1990s, I did cutting and pasting of articles that were put together into a photocopied magazine, or a single page. We had a computer and a printer, but there was no ability to do special page layouts. Instead of mail merge for addresses, we addressed envelopes by hand. The marvel of fax could be used then to get messages out quickly to hospital maternity units.

Then came email, firstly through the Uni, and then at home. What emancipation!

The world of midwifery, and maternity activism, has groups that connect with each other through direct email, Yahoo! groups, and in recent years other social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. In those groups it's very easy to become inwardly focused, with pretty well everyone speaking the same language, or at least those who engage in discussion are. And there is usually, in my experience, a silent majority.

A blog enables information to be shared with anyone who is interested. The networks formed by blogs, with links to other similar blogs and websites, can lead readers down interesting and complex pathways. This crossing of professional and cultural boundaries is useful as an adjunct to the more restricted group discussions.

Blogs enable tracking of numbers of visitors to the site: a sort of statistical self-worth meter. Comments are useful, sometimes agreeing, and sometimes putting an opposing view. The hardest thing for a blogger to face is the doldrums, when noone out there seems interested in all the fascinating material that one has collected and shared. Photos can be used too, and will often draw attention to an otherwise bland page of text.

Australian Private Midwives Association welcomes our readers. Comments that address issues of interest to our group are welcome.

WHO ARE WE?

The Australian Private Midwives Association represents midwives in private practice. The association is focused on the safety of women, the ability of women to access quality midwifery care across Australia and the partnerships between women and midwives. APMA supports women’s choice in maternity options within a framework of quality and safety and believes in women being able to access midwives in all settings. APMA unites all midwives seeking to provide continuity of care for women.

APMA strives to provide midwives in private practice with information relevant to their practice and advocacy in the political process.

Enquiries:
Joy Johnston joy@aitex.com.au
Marie Heath NSW and National 0407 266004
Clare Lane (Vic) 0416 130219

APMA POSITION STATEMENT on PLANNED HOME BIRTHS WITH A MIDWIFE

1. We support home birth with a midwife in attendance for women who have uncomplicated labours. 2. We support and adopt the International Confederation of Midwives’ (ICM) Definition of the Midwife (2011), which is foundational to all midwifery practice, including homebirth. 3. We support the right of every woman to access a midwife as the primary maternity caregiver who works in partnership with the woman throughout the episode of care, who is able to be the responsible professional in attendance at the birth either at home or hospital, and who is able to make appropriate referral and transfer of care when required. 4. We support the right of a midwife to practise privately in a fee-for-service or funded relationship with the client, or to take up employment. 5. We support only those regulatory restrictions that are able to pass the ‘public interest’ test: “How does this promote health and wellbeing in the mother and baby?” 6. We support an expectation of equity, including equal pay for equal work throughout a midwife’s scope of practice. Midwives who provide primary maternity care are entitled to the same public funding, the same opportunity to charge a fee-for-service, the same access to hospital referral, and publicly supported indemnity insurance, as medical practitioners providing the same maternity services. 7. We support processes by which midwives are able to gain experience and mentoring in order to commence and demonstrate competence in homebirth practice. 8. We support seamless and reliable processes by which midwives are able to make hospital bookings for women planning homebirth, and arrange transfer to the hospital in a timely way when needed.