MIDIRS Essence > February 2010 > Student/Tutor feature

Birth in rural Australia - a midwifery student's perspective

Originally posted on Feb 2010

'This birth only confirmed my passion for midwifery and just how amazing the female body is when it’s left alone. I learnt a lot from this woman that you would never learn from a textbook or sitting in a lecture hall. Being with women and providing holistic support is something I have never experienced in others area of nursing and I now realise just how exhilarating it is to be a midwife'.

Tracey Stark, midwifery student at Forbes District Hospital, Australia, gives an honest and uplifting account of some of her birth experiences with women and their families in a rural area of New South Wales.

Hello from rural Australia!

My name is Tracey Stark and I am a midwifery student at Forbes District Hospital in western New South Wales.

We have 26 inpatient beds and provide emergency care, operating theatres, renal dialysis, maternity services, and medical and surgical care. Our maternity unit comprises one designated birthing room, an assessment room and two postnatal beds, and we average 150 births per year.

Our staffing includes two GP/obstetricians, seven practising midwives, a nurse/midwifery unit manager and a nurse manager who help out on those extra busy days! We provide a 24 hour service with one midwife allocated to each shift and we have recently commenced a shared care antenatal clinic to promote woman-centered care and to provide continuity of care for our women throughout their pregnancy, birth and postnatal experience.

From a midwifery student’s perspective, I have had a fabulous year to date and I have had the privilege of being a part of some amazing birth experiences. Part of my course requirement is to ‘follow-through’ 15 women from early pregnancy to six weeks post birth and I have found out just how willing and open women are to have midwifery students as a part of their pregnancy and birth. One woman recently disclosed to me that being my follow-through woman gave her someone to confide in, ask those ‘silly’ questions and someone to boast to and say, ‘Look what I’ve just done! Look at this beautiful baby and what I achieved by myself’ without the outside world telling her that she isn’t the first to give birth and she won’t be the last.

Throughout my studies I have found that women have lost a sense of self and the normality of birth has been lost with it. We have gone from a generation where birth was seen as a normal womanly experience where women banded together to provide support and love, to a generation where childbirth is almost seen as a sickness that needs to be cured. We have stepped into the medicalised world of intervention and time frames that generally go against what nature and the woman’s body needs to do. As a generation we have lost faith in the ability of a woman’s body and feel the need to intervene in the process to give us a sense of fulfilment that we have helped the woman through a brief painful period in her life.

We provide maternity services to low-risk women from a 200 km radius, with the majority of these families coming from rural properties. Our closest base hospital is approximately two hours away; they provide us with 24 hour support should we need to transfer a woman or unwell neonate. It has been these rural women and their families that I have had the most fun with and some of the most interesting experiences.

I was recently privileged to be involved with a birth of one of my ‘follow-through’ women. This was her fourth child but it had been six years since her last baby was born and she was a little nervous. I spent a lot of time with this woman and her family over the course of her pregnancy and we had developed quite a strong bond when it came time for her to give birth. I came in from a day off to hear the labour ward full of laughter as the woman’s husband ‘Ben’ made a small suggestion. ‘Jane’ had presented in early labour that morning and the midwife on duty suggested that she and Ben go for a walk around the lake and this is where Ben’s story took over. Instead of walking with his wife around the lake he decided to take her home, programme the treadmill to walk for an hour, put Jane on this and go and check the cattle and do some paperwork for the farm as it wasn’t him that needed to ‘get the baby moving’. Jane was quite happy with this arrangement as Ben walks too fast and she didn’t need him around asking if she was all right every time she got a tightening.

Jane’s labour progressed well and she had positioned herself standing beside the bed. It was amazing to watch this woman work with her body and listen to what it was telling her. I simply stood back and let nature take its course. Ben provided any support Jane needed and continued to make her smile and laugh with crazy suggestions as to how he could help get the baby out. One such suggestion was to go home, get the tractor and chains, put Jane in the cattle crush and pull the baby out like he sometimes has to pull the calves at home! I must admit that I was a little horrified to start, but his humour only relaxed Jane more and I watched as she went deep within herself and allowed the labour to consume her.

When it came time for Jane to push, Ben became her coach and I remained quiet and let Jane work with her contractions and received the baby before handing him straight up to Mum. This experience was overwhelming and I was extremely proud and honoured to be a part of such an amazing birth. Jane later disclosed to me, after I congratulated her on an amazing birth, that it was an overpowering feeling that she couldn’t fight and felt that she didn’t need to fight as she knew everything was going to be alright and that she would have a beautiful baby at the end.

Being a part of this birth only confirmed my passion for midwifery and just how amazing the female body is when it’s left alone. I learnt a lot from this woman that you would never learn from a textbook or sitting in a lecture hall. Being with women and providing holistic support is something I have never experienced in others area of nursing and I now realise just how exhilarating it is to be a midwife.

Tracey Stark | Midwifery Student | Forbes District Hospital | New South Wales | Australia | Photo: Tracey Stark

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