Homebirth General Discussion #1

[Schmickers]

The public hospital I am attending supports and encourages both active and water birth - isn't that a bit of an anomaly within the public system? [...] and if not for the strong BHs I've been getting would have literally skipped out of the hospital after meeting with the waterbirth consultant midwife!

Good god, what hospital is that? It sounds marvellously enlightened...

[Morgaine]

Cairns Base hospital in my opinion, does not practice what they preach. They are supposedly a Baby Friendly certified hospital, yet the women that I know who have gone there ( some were my clients ) ended up being separated from their babies for a period after birth for unjustifiable reasons.

Like most other hospitals, the experience a woman will have at CBH is dependent on who is rostered on at the time you go into labour. They do have birth pools, but women are only allowed to birth in them if the waterbirth 'specialist' is there at the time to my knowledge. If someone else is using the pools you aren't allowed to bring your own. I don't like how often some midwives will ask if women want pain relief constantly despite the women clearly stating they did not want to be offered and that they were aware of the option.

As for encouraging natural active birth, there are certain routine policies that CBH has that do not work in favour of active birth - like the 20 mins monitoring that they often insist women get on the bed for upon being admission. Again its really dependent on who is on staff at the time. I know some who swear they've had great middies and great births there (but none were first timers which is interesting).

If the woman is a VBAC, CBH is really crap about encouraging natural active birth because their routine protocols for managing VBAC women do nothing to improve or help their chances at VBAC. VBAC protocol doesn't support free active labour. It is pretty restricted and the women I know who have attempted it there have ended up with repeat C/s.

Personally I think the perinatal and maternal data for the hospital says it all, and that blaming it on the amount of "high risk" women who end up there is a cop out. The recommended rates of intervention by the World Health Organisation is based on high risk clientele as well and CBH is well over that margin.

It is a shame that there are no practising homebirth midwives servicing the Cairns area at the moment. The closest is in Mareeba and last I heard, they have stopped attending women in Cairns because of the distance. So basically birth choice is limited to the public or the private (and I'd rather the public), or the highway as one Cairns Post paper put it in Jan 2005 where a woman said she was going to have a home birth without a midwife anyway because the hospital was not an option for her.