This is my very first post, and a good one to start banging the drum you will hear a lot of from me – fairness and accuracy in the news media.
Two articles this week in the ComPost had me seething.
The first was about Wellington Hospital. Who could feel sorry for Capital and Coast District Health Board during its month from hell? It is fairly clear that the organisation is dysfunctional in many areas. But that does not excuse the Compost from unfairly blaming it for the death of a baby whose mother was discharged five hours after giving birth.
The paper linked the baby’s death to the hospital’s quickly dropped plan revealed the previous week to give second-time mothers a $100 grocery voucher if they went home within six hours of giving birth in December and January, to help get around a staff shortage during the peak holiday season.
But the fact is, the baby who died, and the mother, were discharged by the mother’s independent midwife, not the hospital. While mentioning this, the ComPost story doesn’t exactly emphasise it. It should. It is very germane. Independent midwives, who campaigned successfully to drive GPs out of pregnancy and childbirth in the 1990s, are more or less genetically opposed to hospital births and would much rather all births took place at home.
Nonetheless, until the Coroner hears this case, nobody is able to say whether this baby’s sad death could have been avoided had the infant and mother, who had just come through a 20-hour labour and would have been exhausted, been able to stay in hospital.
The second story to seethe me was the one about poor Michael Webby, the Kelburn man who slipped to his death in the early hours after coming home from the Beckam match.
This story all but blamed the city council for his death, citing his girlfriend as having asked the council “months ago” to fix a leaking toby that was making the steps and path slippery, and in an inflammatory way quoting his father as saying the council told him “the leak was none of its business.”
As with the death of a baby, the death of a young man in the prime of life is a very sad event, but shit does happen. It transpired that the path was a private one to Mr Webby’s house, not a public footpath, and the toby likewise was a private one.
Have we really reached the stage in this country where we must blame officialdom, the council or the government for every accidental death? Possibly just as germane in this death was the mention near the end of the story that Mr Webby and his girlfriend had watched Beckham’s LA Galaxy team play Wellington Phoenix from a corporate box at Westpac Stadium.
While I will also wait for the Coroner to establish the facts in this case, I do recall that the Beckam match crowds were streaming from the stadium by 10pm when I was homeward bound from seeing the wonderful Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth: The Golden Age that night. That was several hours before Mr Webby fell to his death on arriving home.
Update December 18: In today’s ComPost, the Wellington City Council admits it is responsible for the broken fence that Mr Webby fell through. The original ComPost story mentioned (once) that he fell through a gap in a railing but implied that the leaking toby, which the story concentrated on, was the cause of the accident. The council has apparently discovered records dating back to the 1930s making it clear it had undertaken to maintain the path, which had come under its “private pathway” policy established in the 1970s.
1 Comment
December 12, 2007 at 6:32 pm
I would be very careful about generalisations such as “Independent midwives, who campaigned successfully to drive GPs out of pregnancy and childbirth in the 1990s, are more or less genetically opposed to hospital births and would much rather all births took place at home.”
There are a wide range of independent midwives, and while a small number are definitely on the militant side about non-medicalised pregnancies and deliveries, the majority are responsible practitioners who try to reflect the mother’s wishes about how a birth is to progress. There’s no evidence that the midwife in this case was “genetically opposed to hospital birth” – if she was, its more likely that she wouldn’t be attending a hospital birth in the first place.
Of course the medical professionals involved in the case should and will have to face the music, but your comment is as ill-informed as the newspaper’s.
New Zealand midwives have sterling reputations internationally (as I found out this morning when I took my wife in for an ante-natal visit here in Japan) – your statement above does nothing to promote “fairness and accuracy in the news media”, and a lot to drag down the reputation for professionalism of many many highly qualified, responsible medical professionals.