Page 1211 - Week 05 - Thursday, 4 June 2020
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with one principal individual, but also a team, and that that woman’s choices are met, she is supported and she understands the potential for what can go right and what can go wrong so that decision-making is as seamless as possible.
The clear message is that the ACT in particular, and Australia in general, is not very good with continuity of care and that this may be a problem with our funding model and the Medicare contribution, which comes from the Commonwealth, and the state contribution through the hospital system. We may have to overcome some funding arrangements, but in this new era of the outbreak of love, which is the national cabinet, the COAG system may be better minded to deal with those systems. So recommendations 11 to 14, which relate to continuity of care, are very important indeed.
There are a number of recommendations that call for the public release of data on a regular basis; that we look to the accreditation of our public maternity services. The last recommendation, recommendation 74, calls for a residential unit for people in need of antenatal and postnatal depression services—one where it is appropriate to take a baby. We heard evidence that, yes, young mothers often end up in mental health facilities in the ACT with their babies but there is nowhere suitable to have a baby. And that adds to the trauma rather than addresses the trauma. There are very good models interstate for the provision of postnatal depression and antenatal depression services which cater for babies as well.
There is a recommendation that we establish a milk bank. Ms Cheyne owes me one! But one of the things that I want to draw to people’s attention is a discussion in chapter 7, beginning on page 71, about the safety of vulnerable, marginalised and disadvantaged groups. Ms Le Couteur touched on it. In a sense, we lacked a lot of evidence in this space, and I was very surprised that we did not receive a submission from, say, Winnunga about Indigenous birthing issues and birthing in country and the like. But neither did we hear from disability groups and the like.
However, the committee is also conducting an inquiry into access to information in the care and protection system. In those public hearings the committee heard quite startling and disturbing evidence about the removal of children from hospital into the care and protection system, and the lack of information about this. We heard that people who may be at risk of having children removed avoid the health system as much as possible. There was alarming information provided to the committee in another context. We believed that it was important that it overlapped with this inquiry, and the evidence from one inquiry was transported into this inquiry, as it covers the removal of children from mothers by child protection agencies after children are born. It is a matter of concern, and the witnesses who spoke to the committee about this were very concerned about the processes involved.
This is a very important piece of work. I believe that the implementation of these recommendations will provide us with a world-class maternity service which would cause others to look at us jealously. We owe it to the women who give birth in the ACT, and their babies, to have the best possible maternity service—a world-class maternity service—and this report is the blueprint for that world-class maternity
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