Maternity crisis: pregnant women left in despair as facilities disappear in regional Australia

Jade van Krimpen is 34 weeks pregnant with her third child and at this point she has no idea where it will be born. She is in Gladstone, Queensland, where the hospital has been on a birthing bypass for months because of staff shortages.

Shortages of midwives and obstetricians in rural and regional Australia have forced maternity units to close or reduce services, leaving women facing the prospect of having to drive long distances, juggle hotels, and other children and partners just to find a safe place to give birth.

Does she drive? Leave the other children? How does she get back, with a newborn baby? Does she need a hotel?

Midwives and obstetricians say the situation in rural and regional Australia was deteriorating for years, then worsened when the pandemic hit, putting intense pressure on health workers and the system. And it has driven the gap between city and country services wider still.

The shortages are patchy across the nation and hard to quantify because of the mix of private and public services, run by the different states and territories, but experts overwhelmingly agree the crisis is disproportionately affecting rural and regional Australia.

Christine Catling is an associate professor in midwifery at the University of Technology Sydney and a research fellow of the National Health and Medical Research Council.

Jemma Manwaring is a local advocate who runs the Save Gladstone Maternity Ward Facebook page and has collected horrifying stories.

One woman, in the middle of miscarrying, went to Gladstone hospital, but with no obstetricians available was transferred at 3am to Rockhampton. She was away for three days, leaving her two-year-old daughter and fiance in Gladstone. By the time she got back, she struggled to breastfeed.

Others describe traumatic rides in ambulances while in labour.

Another woman, too terrified get stuck far from a hospital, will go to Brisbane a month before she is due and says she is lucky she can afford it.

The president of the Australian College of Midwives, Joanne Gray, agrees with Catling that many students entering the system become frustrated and leave. The ideal model, she says, is where a midwife can see the mother through postnatal care and talk to her about how she mothers, breastfeeding, pelvic floor health and birth trauma.

The pandemic also caused a population shift, with people flooding into towns that were not prepared. And births are getting more complicated with the age of mothers rising and chronic diseases more common.

Fewer GPs are willing to take on obstetrics or to move outside the big centres, Bopp says.