It s an opinion backed up by Jill Ovens, from the Midwives Union. We think there should be more financial support for midwives in training, that s a start, she told The Project.
She says the midwives who are working are so burnt out they get upset and leave shifts crying because they can t provide the level of care they know they re capable of. These are professional well-trained women who want to provide the best standard of care - they can t do that if they re so short-staffed.
Watch the full interview above.
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Planned caesareans and labour inductions are being delayed as an increase in babies and a shortage of midwives creates the “perfect storm” for Wellington Regional Hospital’s maternity ward. Senior midwives are being called back to the unit to fill staffing gaps with the ward 100 per cent occupied and unable to take in any more women for most of the last month, said Caroline Conroy, co-leader of the midwives union Meras. Midwives who would want to stay in the room with a new mother as she learns to breastfeed have to leave to attend other women while caesareans and labour inductions were being delayed, Conroy said.
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Groomsman Jason McMillan pictured on the road with blood on his clothes, as the two boaties are treated by ambulance staff.
A wedding party at a Marlborough Sounds resort rescued two men injured in a boat crash at the weekend, using kayaks to reach the sinking boat. Bride Robyn McLaughlin, of Wellington, said her bridal party had “just put their face masks on” when they heard a loud bang near The Portage Hotel in the Kenepuru Sound, about 11pm on Friday. “We had heard the boat start up in the bay, and I remember thinking, ‘I hope that’s not the boys, at that time of night’. And then we heard the crash,” she said.
New Zealand’s 12,000-strong border workforce will be inoculated over three weeks from Saturday starting in Auckland, in the first steps for the nation’s largest mass vaccination programme.