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Updating educators at Flinders Medical Centre

As we talked about the rest of the program we canvassed some of the common problems faced by hospital-based programs, such as the one at Flinders. The main aim is often to tell parents what services the hospital offers and what their policies are on a number of birth related issues. This seems a very obvious aim, and is worthwhile, providing that it is not done is a way that could be seen as “coercive”. From a hospital’s point of view, having non-complaining, compliant clients is a worthy aim, but administrators (and educators) must also realise that unless they present all possible options, they may be leaving themselves vulnerable legally to the charge of not gaining full consent for the various procedures that they are undertaking. Parents may (rightly) object later, if they discovered that a hospital deliberately withheld information about other options they could have requested.

The midwifery educator I spoke to understood these issues, but was hampered in providing appropriate education for her staff by lack of funds and a lack of understanding by management of the importance of parent education.

Some of this could be overcome if the individual educators had better background knowledge themselves. I have often found that midwives didn’t, for example, know the effects of labour pain drugs on the unborn, and newborn, baby. If they don’t know these facts, they can hardly pass them on to parents so that informed decisions about epidurals etc can be made. The educator said she was aware that many of the educators on her team were not well acquainted with the research and she planned a session where this would be discussed. She was intending to give them each a copy of some research done in Victoria that showed that parents felt that pre-natal education was a “waste of time” because it didn’t give them what they wanted or needed. This kind of research never surprises me - so many programs for expectant parents are poorly run and far too short to achieve even the simplest of aims.

I have recommended that this educator approach one of our (almost) graduates of the Graduate Diploma in Childbirth Education who lives in Adelaide. This woman, a very well known consumer activist and independent educator will certainly run a lively session for these Flinders staff and leave them with some food for thought. She will bring a wealth of knowledge to this task and a very definite consumer perspective. I look forward to hearing how it all goes.

Posted by andrea at February 03, 2004 04:02 PM

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