For further information, contact Melissa Maimann at Essential Birth Consulting.
Pregnant women wanting to give birth at home have won a reprieve after Federal Government and the States cut a deal today to allow midwives to continue practising without insurance.
Health Minister Nicola Roxon announced privately practising midwives would have a two year exemption from obtaining medical indemnity cover.
… Under the deal announced today following the Health Ministers conference in Canberra, midwives will be able to keep practising homebirths provided they warn expectant mothers they do not have insurance, they follow quality and safety guidelines being developed and each homebirth is reported to health authorities.
The exemption will last until June 2012 …
Fantastic news!! The details are still hazy though – will home birth be funded in any way? Will midwives who attend births at home be able to access PBS and order tests for their clients? Midwives will need to have insurance to register. What is the situation for midwives who only attend births at home? It seems that they will need to purchase an insurance product that they cannot use!
Melissa Maimann, Essential Birth Consulting 0400 418 448
This reprieve should last until affordable insurance coverage is available instead of petering out in 2012. If the insurance problem hasn’t been solved by then, women will be faced with loosing the choice of attended homebirth yet again.
Have they also granted doctors a reprieve from the mandatory reporting of adverse events as requested?
I don’t think so.
The part that concerns me is where they say, “These provisions will only apply to midwives working in jurisdictions which do not prohibit such practice as at the date of the implementation of the scheme.” What do you make of that??
If I look at only the quoted sentence, then it appears that any jurisdiction can move to prohibit private homebirth without effecting another jurisdiction. So it would be possible for HB to be legal in one area and illegal in the next. This would put the decision to “allow” women to birth at home outside of hospital programs in the hands of local pols., and the federal govt. could then wash it’s hands because it’s a state problem.
In the US homebirth services are fragmented that way, and some women are forced to travel to access midwifery care. It would be shame to see this happen in Aus. especially since the current system works for those who can afford it. It would be nice to have homebirth insured and funded through Medicare, but not if the trade-off is loss of autonomy for women and midwives.