Funding Cuts Hit Midwife Services

The removal of locum funding for midwife services across the Northern Coromandel Peninsula will at times have mothers relying on care up to two hours drive away in Thames.

The situation has arisen with midwife locum funding being withdrawn, which previously covered days off for midwifes working in one of New Zealand’s most remote areas.

Those working across the top of the peninsula and down the eastern seaboard, were previously provided with four days locum cover a month. This has now been withdrawn by Health NZ.

Coromandel based, Sheryl Wright, expressed concern to CFM over what her and her colleagues saw as presenting significant safety risks.

Sheryl said women requiring urgent assessment would no longer have access to timely in-home community assessments, instead being required to travel to Thames, this while potentially being in labour, experiencing pregnancy complications, being unwell after birth, or caring for a new-born.

“With a long-standing critical shortage of midwives across the Coromandel, locum relief is essential to the safe and sustainable delivery of rural maternity services.

“It provides rural midwives with regular, protected time off-call to reduce fatigue, maintain safe clinical practice, and ensure women and babies continue to have access to local, 24-hour emergency maternity care,” said Sheryl.

Health NZ’s proposed alternative requires women to travel to Thames for urgent midwifery care when their own midwife is unavailable. Midwives say this proposal creates significant safety risks.

Sheryl highlighted the fact that as every local knows, the Coromandel Peninsula is particularly vulnerable to severe weather events with road closures.

“There was one last week,” she noted. “This means access to Thames cannot always be guaranteed.

“Replacing local urgent midwifery cover with a travel-based model places women and babies at unnecessary risk and further undermines the sustainability of maternity services in one of New Zealand’s most geographically isolated communities.”