A girlfriend of mine is now 6 months pregnant with her first child and today expressed how scared and upset she is over the treatment she has received from her private OB and how she is pretty much 'stuck' with him for the birth.

DF lives in the Top End and upon finding out she was expecting made contact with a GP who informed her that if she wished to be a private patient she would need to book in with an OB as soon as she could. Where she lives there are only 3 OB's to pick from, 2 of whom only deal with private patients and the third who does public and private patients. She was unable to book in with the first 2 (she was 7 weeks pregnant at the time) so she went with number 3 who I will call Mr C. Mr C did not see her until she was 4 and a half months. At her first appointment she took in a list of questions to ask. She was given 15 min of his time and after asking her first question he told her 'Buy a book'. He then spent the rest of the time telling her what an OB does and what he charges. He gave her no other information. He did not give her the 24 hour number of the maternity ward that she could ring at any time with any question. He answered none of her questions on pregnancy care nor took any interest in her concerns over the issues and worries she had regarding a family history of complicated births. All he did was take her temperature and blood pressure.

DF has been back for 2 other appointments and received similar treatment and given little to no information. She has looked at all her other options with no luck. It is too late to book in with the community midwife program (due to high numbers already booked in), she can not birth in the new midwife led maternity unit at the public hospital (fuly booked), she can not get in with any of the other 2 OB's (fully booked). Her only other option is to go public... and you guessed it, have the same OB she is seeing now as a private patient. So they only thing she is really paying for is a private room in the private hospital as opposed to a shared one in the public. So much for birthing choice in the NT!

What sort of system is 'fully booked' when half the expecting mothers are only 7 to 10 weeks pregnant? You pretty much have to plan conception and 'pre-book' just to have a tiny amount of choice. It is ridiculous that in this day and age in a capital city of Australia you have next to no choice in how you want to bring your baby into this world. One of our OB's even has the nickname 'Caesar King' (guess why ).

To add to DF's situation her DH will be deployed overseas at the time and won't be back for 6 to 8 months! And people up where we live can't work out why many expecting mothers actually go interstate to birth their babies.