Dominion Needs Midwife Training

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 431, 13 August 1928, Page 8

Dominion Needs Midwife Training

STATE EXPERT’S REPORT

KNOW LEDGE AND EQUIPMENT LACKING Wider trainina and better equipment for midwives is a <L cated for New Zealand by dT Henry Jellett, consulting obtte.' trician, who has presented hi fi annual report to the Government. The lack of clinical material and ot the necessary funds, he said, coniri. buted toward the inadequacy of pres ent methods. He believes that when the nev regulations for the training of mid. wives have begun to bear fruit the midwife will be better equipped bum will the medical practitioner. “This is a very serious state of affairs,” he says, “because the aidwife’s training is only designed to make her capable of conducting a normal confinement, and for all abnormal cases she must look to the medical practitioner. If the educatioa of the latter is insufficient, then he is unable to deal with emergencies, and to help him out of them he vfl! among other mistakes, be led to !al] back on radical surgical procedures because of his ignorance of the milder ob stetrical procedures which would hap better served his purpose. The eHec of this on the rate of maternal mor tality is obvious. “It is impossible to lower maternal mortality without improved medical education. It is impossible to provide that education with the resources at present available in the national Medical School of the country. It j, impossible materially to improve then resources without considerable finascial assistance from without. “Presumably, the provision of such assistance in primarily a matter for the Government There must be m»nj wealthy individuals or corporatioaa who are both willing and able to assist in such matters if the necessity for assistance was brought home to them. “Mainly by private benefactions the Faculty of Medicine has available annually for the payment of its stal the sum of £1,600. From similar sources the Faculty of Surgery has a similar sum. The corresponding sum available for the Faculty of Obstetrics is £530, which it is proposed to reduce by £75 at the end of this y w; and yet midwifery is one of the most urgently imx>ortant subjects of the medical curriculum. “During the past 20 years benefactions to the extent of £16,000 have been received by the departments of medicine and surgery. During the same period the department of obstetrics has received nothing, but a little more than 20 years ago it received a benefaction of £425 13s 6d as a special donation toward the foundation of the Batchelor Hospital.”