WHANGANUI District Health Board is 18 percent below its optimum staffing levels in midwifery and unless recruitment is successful, will be 29 percent below optimum from September. Currently the DHB's lead maternity carer (LMC) model is midwifery-run. The DHB's maternity services provide midwifery care for inpatient primary and secondary services, that is,antenatal/labour and birth and postnatal services. A core staff of 14.4 full time equivalent midwives operate Wanganui Hospital's maternity unit on a rostered basis. The continuity midwifery service employs seven midwives. This service looks after 50-60 percent of the clients, with six independent midwives looking after the rest. Ms Oskam said, in Wanganui the average caseload for an LMC is 50-55 cases a year. "For the past 12 months, we've been unable to recruit or attract midwives to our maternity team. We now have 3.8 vacancies two full-time in the continuity team and 1.8 positions in the core team," she said. They were also aware that three more staff were leaving in the near future. She said this would leave the continuity team with only two of the seven full-time equivalents. "This means about 200-400 pregnant women will be without access to continuity care if the same model of care is retained," Ms Oskam said. She said MidCentral Health, Hawke's Bay, Capital and Coast and Hutt Valley health boards were all experiencing the same problem. But she cited several reasons for the staffing crisis, among them an aging workforce, a national shortage, increasing birth rate, onerous requirements in the midwifery re-certification programme and prolonged and unfavourable media exposure. Among the planned actions are a meeting with maternity staff this week to bring them up to date as well as a meeting with Te Waipuna (Maori health provider) to look at ways it may be able to provide support for the DHB. Ms Oskam said they would also set up a stakeholder group involving maternity and primary care interests, including GPs, other agencies and medical and nursing staff. There would also be discussions with other health boards about their maternity care models.
