Video - Midwifery
Transcript
Acting Director of Midwifery Alison: I love what Far North Queensland has to offer for both lifestyle and career prospects.
Clinical Midwife Hannah: It's a place where you actually learn to sit down and build relationships with women because you have the time available to you that you don't have in other settings.
Acting Director of Midwifery Alison: Here you’re travelling over dirt road, you’re sometimes taking a helicopter or a charter flight, you're really getting into remote areas. And then you appreciate what the women have to then access the hospital for their birth or just a general appointment or ultrasounds.
Clinical Nurse Steph: Birthing services within the hospital will be great both for the learning and development of nurses on the floor, as well as being a mum and being able to be at home and come in 5 minutes down the road to have a baby rather than flying out four weeks before and being so far away from home.
Director of Primary Health Care Charlotte: When they come to work for us we'd like them to be part of our community and as our family.
Clinical Midwife Hannah: Torres Strait Islanders and Aboriginal people are incredibly rich and diverse in culture. They are one of the oldest cultural groups globally. Who still have a huge connections to water and their land, and we are incredibly lucky to be able to work with them up here.
Director of Nursing Kindee: Part of our bringing birthing closer to home for the women of the Western Cape is we have been very lucky to bring soils from the lands, from the tribal areas surrounding the Western Cape and we're going to bring them here, to our garden that comes off our birthing suite. Therefore, when they birth their baby, they may plant their feet in the soils from which they come, that is so significant to their cultural beliefs.
Clinical Midwife Graduate Megan: What we're doing is really, really important to close the gap for especially our First Nations women and families.
Acting Director of Midwifery Alison: Whether you are coming on as a cadet and then start on your nursing and midwifery journey, you can come in as an early career midwife, as a graduate midwife and as a registered midwife, and then work up to clinical midwifery. We really need strong midwifery leaders in Australia and Queensland. So, we’re creating that career pathway to support midwives on their career journey.
Executive Director of Nursing Kim: We have the opportunity for people to be supported under the RANIP program, which is the remote area nurses incentive package for nurses. And what it does is it enables them to come in and out of community. So, it's not only around supporting them to get down time, it's also around supporting them to actively and avidly engage in their education. It means that we support them through travel, we support them through their accommodation and we also support them in their registration.
Clinical Midwife Graduate Megan: I've got a lot of the competencies that you struggle to get in your first year as a new grad. So, you work within your full scope, which is something really important to me. In remote settings we work with extreme pre-termers, as well as post-states, as well as complex medical needs for women. And that's not something that all midwives get to do, It's something that you get to do in a rural setting.
Acting Director of Midwifery Alison: You often meet people that come to rural and remote areas that think they'll come for two weeks and they're still here ten, twenty years later. So, it definitely gets under your skin.
Clinical Midwife Hannah: Aunty Margie has birthed babies, of babies, of babies here and she knows the language, she knows the culture, she understands some of the social determinants, especially within particular family groups or island groups.
Aunty Margie: They teach us and we teach them back our culture, they teach us their way, because when they come they bring their culture with them. And the two cultures are mixed, it's beautiful.
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