QUEENSLAND Health Minister, Lawrence Springborg, yesterday announced an initiative designed to attract an extra 50 midwives to rural and regional areas.
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"50 graduate nurses will be offered a two year program working in private midwifery practices to gain the necessary experience for a degree in midwifery," Mr Springborg said.
"It leads the way in developing a midwifery workforce for rural and remote areas and will increase the choices of Queensland women and the availability of private midwives."
Speaking to Queensland Country Life ahead of a Rural Birth Summit in Cairns where he is expected to announce the initiative yesterday, Mr Springborg said his innovative education model would support graduate nurses to work within a continuity of care private practice midwifery model.
"For passionate graduate nurses that are successful, this will be a dream position to be paid to specialise and study and grow our maternity services," he said.
"The end result will see rural health services mentor graduates into career pathways that will ensure the future sustainability of smaller health services and will result in a midwifery workforce ready for community based rural and remote employment. This is all part of this government's commitment to increasing women's choices and access to private midwifery care models and will have a research and review component built on it."
The announcement has been cautiously welcomed by the Rural Doctors Association of Queensland (RDAQ) president, Dr Sue Masel.
"Any educational funding that increases the total number of midwifery graduates in the State and involves a positive experience in a rural birthing unit as part of that training is likely to help boost the number of rural midwives to some extent," she said.
"We know that being from a rural background and doing rural training time are positive indicators of likelihood to work rural for doctors, so it would stand to reason that a careful selection process for these graduate nurses would assist to stream them into rural maternity units."
But Dr Masel said more detail was needed on how the extra midwives would be encouraged to work in regional and rural areas after they completed their training.
"My concern with the proposal to spend the two years of training in private midwifery practices is that those practices are usually urban and private sector," she said.
"That's two steps removed from the situation in most of the rural birthing units where we want to see them working eventually. If we are successful in reopening birthing in places like Cooktown and Weipa, we will need midwives who work in the public sector and who are happy to work in close knit rural teams alongside rural doctors.
"I do not know what the perfect education model for achieving that would be, but certainly RDAQ are willing to be involved in those discussions."
