By Five Submission to Taskforce Gives Local Expertise a Voice

By Five recently had the opportunity to provide a submission to the Victorian Maternity Taskforce, highlighting challenges and opportunities related to the provision of maternity services in our region.

The Taskforce was established in October 2024 to address challenges in maternity care and identify opportunities to strengthen the safety, sustainability and accessibility of rural and regional maternity services in Victoria. With our partners, we collated local data and knowledge from our work in antenatal care over the past three years to shine a light on the very limited access to shared antenatal care for women in the WSM. We know we have midwives and MCH Nurses who are not able to provide the scope of maternity care they would like to, and our health services who want to support the provision of this care. Currently the system does not support this, however we know that by looking at opportunities for genuinely co-designed, place-based solutions, with support from birthing hospitals, we can turn this around and increase access to quality care for women, close to where they live.

See below an excerpt of a letter of support provided by one of our passionate rural nurses and midwives:

 I have been fortunate to have been working as a midwife for nearly 30 years. I am very passionate about rural and remote maternity care in Victoria and have been working hard to help provide and encourage extended supported outreach midwifery services in our community. To ensure rural women and their families in our community are able to access safe, affordable, positive, consistent, travel friendly antenatal care in the bush with local midwives who they know, regardless of their birthing hospital, is such a needed and wanted service. Being innovative, advocating for our women and establishing positive collaborative relationships with the neighbouring birthing hospitals has unfortunately brought many challenges. Restrictions placed on us has meant that we are unable to provide women with low-risk antenatal care in our health care settings despite working within our scope of practice, having documented positive consumer outcomes, more affordable and easily accessible antenatal care, wonderful support and advocacy from the By Five WSM Early Years Initiative and strong voices from our consumers, wanting better, local maternity care. 

My role as a RN/RM in a community health setting focusing on primary health care, prompted me about 3 years ago, to become more proactive, in the maternity care space, as to how we can best support low risk women for their antenatal care in our local community. It seemed that more and more maternity services that were once available to women in the bush were closing and women and their families have had to travel long distances for all their antenatal care, despite the availability of local experienced midwives being able to provide the care they needed. Covid amplified the need for more local services to support women and their families.

There are real opportunities to build on quality care that is already being provided to our local rural families and it is very pleasing that there is a maternity taskforce working on maternity services in Victoria.