The scanned page here is from a Draft Summary of Professional Indemnity Insurance for Midwives, developed by the NMBA. This flow chart outlines the process for midwives to comply with the professional indemnity insurance (PII) requirements of the National Registration and Accreditation Scheme which has been in effect since 1 July this year.
Well, the discussion didn’t stop there. I am writing a piece for the Crikey bulletin on related issues, some of which are also aired in the current issue of the BMJ (extract available here, but the full article costs).
Below are three sets of comments that helped inform the BMJ and Crikey articles. Firstly an email comment from Drs Steven Woloshin and Lisa Schwartz from the Center for Medicine and the Media at the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice in New Hampshire. They are international leaders in efforts to improve media coverage of health and medicine.
One of the problems is that the planned home birth group includes women who planned homebirth at booking but then developed risk factors and had their babies in hospital. There are probably only two women whose babies died who started labour at home planning a homebirth and one of these was a twin pregnancy (high risk). The others had all transferred before the onset of labour. The authors admit they ‘could not differentiate all planned homebirths according to whether transfer to hospital had occurred before or during labour.’ So for low risk women who start labour at home the risk is very low - 1 death in 16 years.
For babies born at home the news is even more encouraging. There were only 2.5 deaths per 1,000 actual homebirths making homebirth at 328% safer for babies than birth in hospital.
For a long time now we have heard the rumours of a new home birth study that Dr Pesce had hidden under his hat, waiting to release it at the perfect moment. Reportedly it showed a baby had seven times more chance of dying at a homebirth but a close inspection of the research reveals these claims as false.
Interesting, isn’t it? Mountaineering Dude and Homebirther seem to be a bit of a wash, risk wise. I can only surmise that it’s part of the tangled web of gender expectation. Men take risk, good; it all fits with the manly character (and the idea of venture capitalism) and is necessary and good. Also, their [...]
On Friday afternoon it was announced that midwives in private practice will be granted an exemption from the indemnity insurance requirement for registration until June 2012. Am I cheering? No. I’m breathing a sigh of relief for those couples who were desperately trying to conceive by the end of this month in order to be [...]