Page 1210 - Week 05 - Thursday, 4 June 2020
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that and what can be done to support women and their families when they are giving birth with the caregivers in a different language.
There are 74 recommendations, including our most important one: that the planning, design and delivery of maternity services be woman and baby centred. I sincerely hope that the ACT government will implement at least a lot of them and that this will benefit birthing women, their babies and their families for many years to come.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (11.04): I would like to start by acknowledging the great work that has been done in this committee report. I think that people on the outside sometimes think that committee work is dull and does not have much going for it, but today we can sit back and say that this is a job of work of which the members and the committee secretariat involved can be really proud. The genesis of this inquiry was an overall air of concern that maternity services in the ACT were not as good as they could be. This was in the background of anonymous letters to the paper from staff talking about concerns in the hospital.
That was the genesis of it, but this committee looked to the future. There are 74 recommendations that, if implemented, would give us a maternity health service for mothers and babies which would put us at the forefront in the world. Recommendation 1 is essentially it. As Ms Le Couteur said, if you just did that, that is all you need. We could have got away with just one recommendation. That recommendation—that the plan and design and delivery of maternity services is woman and baby-centred—does, however, have many aspects to it.
Ms Le Couteur spoke about the cut-down mothers’ club. In a way, Mr Pettersson dodged a bullet on this one. I think he would have found it extraordinarily uncomfortable to sit through some of the hearings that we held. There were days when everybody in the room was in tears. Of course, that is not a matter of surprise to my colleagues, but I did realise that I was not the only person blubbing uncontrollably at some of the evidence that we heard. It would have been awfully uncomfortable for Mr Pettersson, I am sure, having to hand the tissues around for the rest of us.
I do not want to make light of this. Some of the evidence we heard, as Ms Le Couteur and Ms Cody said, was very heartfelt. The experiences of the women and the members of their families were substantial and have an ongoing impact on their lives. Although for most of us birth is a natural part of our lives, for some people it is traumatic, and that trauma needs to be addressed so that the trauma is not ongoing. The hours of evidence, from a range of individuals and organisations who are intimately and passionately involved in the provision of maternity services, show what fantastic resources we have here in the ACT and how good our system could be with the application of a little innovation and, really, not all that much money.
We are not actually calling for vast amounts of money to be spent; it is about planning and application and integration. I think the most important thing, apart from recommendation 1—that services be woman and baby-centred—are recommendations 11 to 14, which relate to continuity of care. The thing that we heard most often was that the best maternity services were those that provide continuity of care and carer, so that the birthing mother has a strong relationship—a relationship of understanding—
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