Series 2 Episode 1: Gina Bundle and Storm Henry on trust in hospitals

Gina Bundle is a Yuin/Monaro woman and the Program Coordinator of Badjurr-Bulok Wilam – meaning ‘Home of many women’ in the Woiwurrung language of the Wurundjeri Peoples – at the Royal Women’s Hospital. Storm Henry is a Pitjantjatjara/Wiradjuri woman who initially started studying linguistics/languages at Monash University then transferred to a Bachelor of Nursing/Bachelor of Midwifery. Storm is currently a Clinical Midwife Specialist within Baggarrook Caseload, where she has been working since Dec 2019. She is interested in birthdays, birth politics and Eurovision.

Storm Henry
Gina Bundle

Transcript

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INTRO
You’re listening to Birthing and Justice. I’m Ruth De Souza, and for those of you joining us for this season, I’m a nurse by background, with extensive practical and research experience with new parents. In this series I’m having conversations about birth, racism and cultural safety, in the hope that they might transform birthing and healthcare into transitions where all people can flourish. I’d like to start by acknowledging that I’m speaking to you from the unceded sovereign lands of the Boonwurrung people of the Eastern Kulin Nations. I pay my respects to all the Elders and Warriors who’ve resisted colonisation, invasion and genocide, and who share Country with all of us. I pledge my solidarity as an uninvited guest, to the continuing struggles for justice by Traditional Owners. This land always was, and always will be, Aboriginal land. Today I’m talking to a dream duo­­—my friend Gina, and her colleague Storm.

 

[music plays]

 

Gina Bundle is a Yuin/Monaro woman. She works at the Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne, where she is the Program Coordinator of Badjurr-Bulok Wilam. This means ‘Home of many women’ in the Woiwurrung language of the Wurundjeri people. She’s also an amazing artist, and probably the best op-shopper I have ever seen in action. Storm Henry is a Pitjantjatjara/Wiradjuri woman who began studying linguistics at Monash University before she transferred to a Bachelor of Nursing/Bachelor of Midwifery. Storm has worked at the Royal Women’s Hospital since 2017 as a nurse and a midwife. She’s currently a clinical midwife specialist with Baggarrook caseload, where she’s been working since December 2019. She’s interested in birthdays, birth politics and Eurovision. Together Gina and Storm are trying to change the isolating impact of Western public hospitals for Indigenous people, by developing more collective ways of supporting new Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families.

 

[music fades]

 

RUTH DE SOUZA (host) —
So I’m going to start with Storm first. Can you tell me why you care about birthing?

 

STORM HENRY (guest) —
Thanks for having me Ruth. I think there’s a lot to care about with birthing. I think my interest in birthing originally came about when I was working at my local Aboriginal co-op in Warrnambool on Gunditjmara Country. And I sort of became fascinated by the role of the community midwife, and seeing that her role wasn’t just working with women, it was kind of the heart of the community—like new babies, new families, the Elders of tomorrow kind of vibe. And I think birthing’s such a great place where you have the potential to really transform, you know, health care of families, but also just overall health and wellbeing of communities in a broader context.

 

Thank you Storm, that’s so beautiful. And your answer reminded me of Naomi Simmonds, my first interviewee, who talked about the Māori word for midwife, or birth attendant, which is kai whakawhānau which means to make family. And I love your description, which is to make community. I’m going to now ask Gina to say something about why you care about birthing.

 

GINA BUNDLE (guest) —
Well being a mother myself I have my own experience in birthing. Historically, birthing for me… in the country that you grew up colonised, women were forced into a certain way of giving birth. And yet I know we had a most amazing way of doing those things, naturally. You know, women have been giving birth forever, not just in these very sterile settings. And so natural birth, and what they call Birthing on Country now, has always been a part of my interests for a long, long time. Women and children have been a part of what I’ve done in my working life forever. And so it’s a part of… it’s actually a big part of a bigger picture that I’ve worked in all my life.

 

And how did you become the Program Coordinator of the Aboriginal health unit at the Women’s [Hospital], Gina?

 

GB
I actually started off as the Aboriginal Liaison Officer. There was another program coordinator before me, and others before her. And so the Women’s [Hospital] actually have had Aboriginal workers, or an Aboriginal health unit at the Women’s [Hospital] for quite a long time. The building that we’re in now is the new Women’s Hospital; there was an older Women’s Hospital up the road a bit further. So Aboriginal health has been on the agenda there for a while. You know Aboriginal hospital liaison officers have been around for a while also, you know 20 plus years. And so while I was doing other work prior to what I do now, I’ve always had access to Aboriginal hospital liaison officers, you know, as a community member. So I’ve always known about them, and my interest has been within the health field of Aboriginal women and children. So this has actually been a wonderful… probably the final step in my working career to where I am now—I don’t see myself going anywhere after this.

 

And that kind of leads me to a question for Storm: why is caseload midwifery and continuity of care so important, in terms of culturally safe care for Aboriginal families, and in terms of Closing the Gap?

 

SH
I think continuity of midwifery care across the board has, you know, been really well researched and trying to have such great outcomes for mums and babies of all backgrounds. But I think particularly for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander birthing women, or birthing people, when there’s a lot of history in hospitals that can make it hard to trust not just the care providers but the entire system, that having, you know, a single point of contact with your continuity of care midwife, to help you navigate that system and to help you feel seen and supported and address your priorities in your health care, is really kind of essential. To be an active participant in your own care, rather than the hospital determining what your priorities are and how you should address them.

 

GB
Absolutely.

 

And I’m wondering Storm if you could say a little bit more about trust?

 

SH
Yeah, oh there’s a lot to say about trust [restrained laughter]—I think I’m still learning trust. I think, you know, historically hospitals have probably been one of the most untrustworthy places for Aboriginal families. You know, to come seek medical care—particularly at the Women’s [Hospital], which has that underlying philosophy of, you know, providing care to women of all backgrounds, no matter what their, you know, race or income, is that sort of early Women’s Hospital philosophy—to then come to that place, seek care and then have your baby removed from you at a time when you’re such a new mother at such an emotional time, it’s just… breaks my heart really. I’m trying to imagine how that would make me feel.

 

GB
It’s a really emotional topic, especially in regards to… the Women’s [Hospital] at the time did actually do an apology also to the Stolen Generation because of their part that they played as the government… as a government arm of removing Aboriginal babies and they acknowledge that. And I think that that was important, well it was important for me to feel okay in working in a place like that also, because you can’t go forward if you don’t see what you’ve done in the past and do it differently. And I think between myself and Storm and the program of the Baggarrook team, that’s only a small part of doing things differently, but it’s a whole hospital approach that needs to be done differently that will create the trust—not only for the staff members, but the patients that walk through our doors. But we need to feel okay in how we deliver our services to our women, so that they feel that they can trust their most precious, precious thing to us, when they come and use our service. We have big shoes to fill.

 

SH
And I think, you know, we’re talking about trust in a cultural sense, which is a really… a huge thing, but we also acknowledge that so many of the women and people who come through our service might also kind of sit in other intersectionalities where they’ve felt to us that they… to disclose a same sex relationship and Aboriginality is like a double… too much to disclose. And so there’s sort of a sense of trust and safety on multiple levels, when sort of nothing feels safe. We need to make, maybe things that are in some cases less easy to hide for some people—their cultural identity—safe, while they determine whether or not they feel like they can trust the service with other key aspects of their personhood.

 

GB
Yes. That’s probably one of the most important parts of our role, is keeping our women safe…

 

SH
Mhmm.

 

GB
while they’re within our system that we work in, knowing also that this is a system that works against us in some instances, but in the same sense, we have the responsibility and the duty of care to make sure—despite anybody and everything—that the women who walk in our door will be culturally safe and identify themselves in any way that they choose.

 

SH
And their choice, I think, is the key part there. That Aboriginal women absolutely have so much agency and trust because we offer Baggarrook as an Aboriginal caseload model doesn’t mean that Aboriginal families are obliged to want to work with us.

 

GB
Yes—choice always has to come first.

 

SH
Absolutely.

 

GB
Mm, mm. Because in times gone past there was never a choice—choice was taken from people, and [they] had things done to them, not to work with people, to do things together, it was done to people, whether they liked it or not. And so the importance of people having ownership of their own health, having something or not having something, choosing to do something or not do something, is so important, especially in the realms of informed consent, you know? It is their health journey, and we shouldn’t be enforcing upon them what we think is good for them.

 

SH
I think in maternity too, this concept of informed consent is something that could be improved on across the board, you know, that all women, particularly when declining aspects of standard care, there’s that aspect of reproductive kind of coercion and obstetric violence that is really, less unspoken now, but it’s still quite accepted. And it’s kind of really horrifying as a clinician sometimes the things you’ll observe and say ‘That’s actually not okay.’ And then to see that continue, it feels like you’re going crazy sometimes; [restrained laughter] you feel like you’re living in a… like outside of your body looking in sometimes, just at the traumatic things that have become so ingrained in maternity culture.

 

GB
I think also one of… as Storm was saying, you know, sometimes we see things that aren’t okay. And while we work within a system like that, it’s also important that we feel safe to be able to say, ‘Hang on a minute, that’s not right.’ And the hospital is getting much, much better at that in allowing staff to come up and say, ‘Hang on, that’s not right, how can we do that better?’ The hospital does encourage patients to make complaints; they say they want to hear ‘cause they can’t change things if they don’t know about them, you know. And so I encourage our patients, if something’s wrong, this is the process we go down and we need to make a complaint if that’s what you want to do, because it has to be allowed to happen, because we’re not the bosses of them, you know, we’re responsible to them. And that’s really important to see it in that light—we have a responsibility to them. They owe us nothing. You know, they come to us expecting to be safe and to be cared for. And if anything outside of that happens to the detriment of them, that’s our responsibility to fix. And it’s really important that we’re free to be able to raise our voice and say, ‘Hang on, that… what happened just then is not right’ and have that looked at by, you know, escalating it further up the line and being allowed to do that and being comfortable in doing that. It’s really important to be able to know that that’s allowed. And you know, places like hospitals and other big government departments, you know, they’re run by a hierarchy. Ours is like that, but we can have a voice all the way up the chain, which I think is a must for any big place. Otherwise everything gets lost in translation otherwise, you know. But we have voices all the way up the chain so… and I think that’s a fantastic thing that the Women’s [Hospital] has implemented.

 

One of the things that I’m really hearing as we’re having this conversation—which is filling my heart with great joy right now [chuckles]—is how cultural safety operates on so many different levels. And so you had your hospital Chief Executive Sue Matthews kick off the Reconciliation Plan in February 2020, by acknowledging the history of the Women’s [Hospital] and specifically the hospital’s role in the Stolen Generations and making an apology, and then you’ve got this pathway for complaints, you’ve got this informed consent. You also have activities like a monthly yarning circle, the Baggarrook Gathering, which allows new mums and mums-to-be, or new parents and parents-to-be, a chance to meet other Aboriginal families. I’m really interested in all these beautiful, kind of ways in which families are supported. And I wondered if you could tell me a little bit about this yarning circle, as well as the activities like Meet your Midwife evenings and so on?

 

SH
Yeah so unfortunately COVID has really impacted our ability to deliver these sessions face-to-face, and our experience of trying to move these kind of group activities online has just been that the… I guess kind of the heart or the authenticity of the group hasn’t really well translated into an online world. But the monthly yarning circle I think was getting increasingly more popular. The final one we had just before lockdown last year was a really big afternoon in a park—we had so many families come! And I think one of the areas I’m particularly passionate… that I’d like to see maybe a little bit more growth from the Women’s Hospital—‘cause as a gendered hospital there is a lot of focus on women and birthing people, naturally—but for our families who come through Baggarrook who get their culture on the side of their father or the other parent, you know, we could improve, I think, how do we build up those families in culture. So it’s really great to have an opportunity where dads and partners can become involved, meet other mob. We’ve had, you know, baby cousins meet and, you know, have families find out that they’re related, or see family they haven’t seen in a long time. And it just feels like a really big party slash parents group. And it’s quite informal, we don’t sort of set an agenda that we’re going to talk about X, Y and Z, because there’s sort of breakout conversations and we’re available if they want clinical advice and to catch up, and [it’s] really nice to see how big babies are growing, and find out how things are settling at home, and what services can we help link you in with if things are struggling. So a really great time!

 

[music plays]

 

How important is it for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander families to be able to incorporate culture and traditions into pregnancy and the birth suite? And you’ve hinted a little bit about this Storm, but I wondered if you could say a bit more about that?

 

[music fades]

 

SH
I think it’s so important because when we look at someone’s Aboriginal identity, that’s sort of like… it’s your whole person, you can’t decide to exclude your Aboriginality from medical events or from rites of passage. And traditionally birth was such a big rite of passage, that would be how you connect with the women in your community that would cement your connection to your Country, and a whole bunch of ceremony involved in that. And then as well… like Gina was saying earlier, how we’ve moved into the hospital space, we’ve lost that, but now we can reclaim aspects of that, similar to how Naomi Simmonds was talking in your first podcast about the placenta ritual. That’s probably one of the most common ways we see traditional birthing practices incorporated here in Melbourne: families to take placenta home for burial, to you know, dry some cord and make some art and take placenta to Country via an encapsulated placenta if we can’t take it in a plane, doing placenta art prints. And I think there’s also now a lot of, you know, Aboriginal aroma therapy, you know, having ochre sprays and kind of, I guess, modern versions of traditional culture that can be easily brought into a hospital space. And that’s really important that we respect that, because as Gina was saying, it’s just us to facilitate really what the family wants and support them in their, you know, plans for birth and their journey to motherhood and parenthood, which looks different for everyone. And it’s really nice for us too. Especially for families I think who aren’t, you know, through the history of the Stolen Generation, maybe not connected to their cultural lands or cultural people, or their sort of, their Country, that some of these kind of common practices like placental ritual can really help you connect to your own sense of identity when maybe that’s been lacking. And often parenthood is a really big catalyst for families to want to explore, ‘Where do I come from? Specifically I was happy to know that, you know, family was here, but I wanted to go to Country and I want to connect with family, and I want to find out about my traditions and incorporate that into my family life.’

 

GB
Oh, I think Storm just said that so beautifully. And women are taking up those options. We endeavor to provide ways for them to do that within the hospital space, and we’ve been doing all of those things, which has been excellent. We’ve also been trying to bring some mental health issues and activities that come along with that too, because birthing in a place like a hospital can be very stressful. Because we’re the type of hospital we are, we actually have women that stay with us as inpatient for months, you know, and then their babies have to stay with us for months after that. Or they go to the Royal Children’s [Hospital] depending on what the circumstances are around. And in saying that also, because of the hospital that we are—the type of hospital that we are—we actually have women that come from the Torres Straits, who’ve never been to the city before, who don’t speak English, English is not their first language. And so us who also… where English is our first language, now we’ve lost our language in that sense, it’s… can be a real learning on both sides of the fence. But our main objective is to make sure that those women are protected to the best of our ability while they’re in our care and in the setting that they’re totally, totally not used to. And so it’s a real mixture of cultures, even though we’re the one, you know, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have a connection that’s been for never ending, and to bring them both together and to… for us as workers within a place like that, to incorporate all the different cultures—’cause we’re just not one person, we’re different… made up of different tribes, different territories, different lands. And it just… all of those different ceremonies, languages, you know, all the revival that has been happening—which is so wonderful—we try and incorporate people’s individual identities as well. And so it becomes a real tightrope in some instances, ‘cause there’s a lot the same, but there’s a hell of a lot that’s different from one tribal group to another. And, you know, everybody’s learning, the revival of those cultures and ceremonies, songlines and dance, is astounding, but it’s relatively new in the bigger scheme of giving birth to babies in a hospital, [a] mainstream setting. And we just think that all of that just needs to come into the hospital and explode, [laughter] you know, because it’s just so vibrant and we want to bring that—we want them to be able to bring that— into our space, because we learn just as much as we protect. You know it helps us learn to protect better. Because that’s our main role, is to make sure our women are protected and safe while they’re with us.

 

SH
I think Baggarrook is just one model of care available in Australia, and there’s lots we can learn from other Aboriginal-led models—and Gina knows that I have become a little bit obsessed with the Gold Coast model [Gina laughs] Waijungbah Jarjums. And they’ve got some really great aspects of language revival incorporated into their model of care where they’re creating, you know, resources in language and local language, to support women as part of their pregnancy and parenthood journey. And I think that’s really special.

 

GB
Absolutely Storm! And one of the things that we did do when we realised what was going on with language for some of our women’s is that we’ve got a partnership with the Darwin Hospital—because a lot of our women’s came through the Darwin Hospital—and their interpreter services not only has the usual language interpreters, but they also had a group of Aboriginal interpreters for all the other Countries that are up the top end, you know, and it was just amazing and it worked for us at that time. It was great.

 

So I’m wondering Gina, what would your advice be to someone pregnant, an Aboriginal person, who might be listening to this podcast?

 

GB
If someone is pregnant, in Victoria especially, but across Australia now, there are Aboriginal programs, or Aboriginal hospital liaison officers in the majority of big hospitals and regional hospitals. If you want to identify and have access to those services, find them: look them up in the hospital, ask people ‘Where are they; where are we?’ you know? And then you can decide whether you want to identify within the system or not. Usually the… asking the question is a big thing for hospitals and other government departments: ‘are you Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander?’ That’s the question that will get you to us. In our hospital, at the Royal Women’s— Badjurr-Bulok Wilam where I work—our door is always open, people can walk in and just refer themselves. But, you know, in our hospital also our social work department are very good at letting people know that we’re here and offering referral to us. But just know that there are Aboriginal workers in most hospitals across Australia, that will be there to help you—just ask!

 

Storm, as far as we know, you’re the only Aboriginal midwife working in this model of care in Victory at the moment. How do you look after yourself? And where do you get support, as you’re working within a settler-colonial white institution?

 

SH
Hmm. Great question. I would love to not be the only midwife working in this space. Absolutely I appreciate there’s some great other Aboriginal midwives at our hospital, and perhaps this model of care isn’t quite right for them at the moment with family commitments et cetera. But I guess my dream would be that programs like Baggarrook would be staffed by all Aboriginal staff. For me, in terms of how do I look after myself? It’s definitely something that I’m always working on—I think we’re all always working on that. I like to be able to go and see my family who’s in Southwest Victoria, go to the beach, get my toes in the sand, just reset. And it can be really hard to switch off, I think, for Aboriginal staff, because you’re not able to leave as much at work as the non-Aboriginal staff. But I think learning that prioritising your own health and wellbeing makes you a more available midwife and helps you be better at your job, is something that… it’s really important to learn and prioritise because it’s not being selfish, it’s being the best version of you as a person and as a health professional that you can be.

 

That’s a beautiful answer Storm—that that self-care is primary, hey! I was thinking about your comment about, you know, working in this model by yourself and wanting to have more people like you around. What would your advice be, Storm, to people who want to enter nursing and midwifery from Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander backgrounds?

 

SH
I think there’s lots of different advice that you could, you know give or take as it suits you. I found for me, one of my best supports at Uni[versity] was linking in with the Aboriginal support department. I went to Monash University and they were really helpful for me in terms of even accessing the course, giving me support and resources while I studied. I think Monash actually has a health specific Aboriginal support department now [Gukwonderuk Indigenous Health], which I think is new, compared to when I was there, but I think most universities now have that support. And then a lot of hospitals now are really interested in working with Aboriginal students in the view to helping them establish their health career. So thinking about, what hospitals are near you, or what hospitals you’d like to work at and seeing: do they offer priority placements for Aboriginal students? Do they offer cadetship programs? Are they offering supported grad[uate] years? Who do you become friends with? What advice can they give you? even if it’s helping prepare for a future application—that really set me up. And then I guess, you know, finding, you know, good peers and, CATSINaM [Congress of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Nurses and Midwives] has been a really helpful support for me. And Weenthunga Health Network has been another good support for me. Keeping networked with my peers and learning from each other. And I have a very nice manager who always makes sure to check in about all of these things.

 

This is for both of you: what would your advice be to a midwife or a nurse who was caring for an Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander family?

 

GB
Read the room! [chuckles] Really pay attention to what’s going on in the room. And if you’re lucky you’ve been with this person for a little bit longer than just when the day comes—giving birth. So your people skills have to be really good. Being able to put somebody at ease, long before they’re actually having a baby, makes the whole process of having the baby so much easier. They trust you for one, they feel comfortable in all their glory in front of you, and it’s really important that that rapport has built before the time comes for baby to be born.

 

SH
I think my advice maybe is a bit more generic, in that I’m a big believer in that culturally safe care can’t just be offered by Badjurr-Bulok Wilam and Baggarrook—like it’s a whole hospital effort. So just because you can link a woman in with these services—and it’s great that you do if the women or families want it—but you are encouraged, and it’s kind of your professional obligation actually, to offer culturally safe support. And if you need to engage in training to figure out, ‘What does that look like?’ If you want to ask your Aboriginal peers or Aboriginal support unit, ‘What am I doing well or not well?’ or ‘How can I learn more in this space?’ then please do it. And then also, yeah, I think just a little bit of time to reflect on your own unconscious bias—we all have it. I’m doing a bit of work at the moment thinking about all these different racial microaggressions and things like that. And I think a big one that comes up for me is that Baggarrook has been at the Women’s [Hospital] for, you know, five years and still no one can spell it. It’s… I think it’s a very easy word to spell; [restrained laughter] I could be a little bit biased. [Gina laughs in background] But you know words have power and names have power, and these are the names that have been gifted to us to use, that it’s just a small way of… you know, spelling the words properly or learning to pronounce them properly is just one way that seems really small, but adds up to be really big things.

 

GB
Absolutely. Absolutely. I’m a big fan of the art of the word, because how you communicate, whether it be with your facial images, your body language, if you can speak and speak the words well—which is also… can be an art sometimes. But allowing yourself [to] be open to be friendly to people, ‘cause that’s a real art too for some, they don’t know how to be friendly, you know? And in a place… where we work, we should all be very, very friendly and approachable, no matter what race we are. ‘Cause collectively we are responsible for them. So you’re right there Storm, it’s not just our role to create the culturally safe environment, it’s our role together, collectively, to create a culturally safe environment for all of us—staff and patients, and the wonderful colleagues that we work with. Because we actually can’t do this work by ourselves, ‘cause there’s not enough of us. And that’s another story.

 

Well, maybe I can pick up on that a little bit and ask you, in terms of the microaggressions that you just mentioned Storm and Gina, I’m wondering how can the broader staff body support Aboriginal staff? You know, how can they ensure your cultural safety?

 

GB
I think management and higher up need to actually be involved at the ground level also. They have to know what’s going on in their hospital because the ultimate responsibility lays with them. But they also need to offer some solutions, ‘cause they also hold the power there as well. And it’s important that they do their jobs well. They’re the people that we rely on to get things done and to make changes that need to be made. And so it’s really important that they know what their jobs are and to do them well and to remove barriers for us, because they have the power to do it. We can jump up and down all we like and you know, who knows we might get the sack or something, [laughs] but really, they have the power to remove barriers. And that’s just sort of coming from the management area that I am in. And so they have the power to remove barriers, that will then enable us to do our work the way we need to do it.

 

SH
I would encourage non-Aboriginal staff to do their own research. Often, well you know relying on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander staff to do all the research for you, you know that’s a lot of spoons for us. You know there’s no one stopping you. Google’s a big world wide web, or even checking in before you ask for some support and questions, you know making sure that you go to the effort to finding out what programs are offered at your hospital. Recently I ran into a doctor who wasn’t a hundred percent sure of my role, but seemed to think that I worked with women who had psychosocial problems. And I sort of had to correct them and say, ‘That’s actually not my role at all. It’s very easy for you to find out what my role is and that’s actually quite offensive that you would assume that we… the hospital has invested in a team to brand women problematic, basically!’ So I think we’ve all got a lot that we can learn from each other, but there’s also a lot of learning that we need to do on our own. Just being mindful that there’s not a lot of Aboriginal staff, particularly at our hospital, and that asking them to do all the work for everyone is too big a burden. And that you could actually ease some of the burden for us and for the women who come through the service by doing a bit of… yeah, solo research.

 

GB
Absolutely. It is 2021 and people should know about Australian Aborigines by now. [Giggles] So, there’s no excuses for not knowing.

Is there anything you think I should’ve asked you that I haven’t asked you, that you think would be really important to talk about?

 

GB
I think it’s important to also know that there are other services out there that we work with, as the hospital, you know. The KMS services—the Koori Maternity Services—which is twenty-one years old. They have mostly non-Aboriginal midwives and Aboriginal health workers who are in the community and are attached—most of them but not all—attached to the Aboriginal medical services, Aboriginal organisations in the communities. There are a couple of KMS services based inside hospitals, I think two maybe three, but the majority of them are in the community and in the organisations. So women can come to us—we specialise here in Melbourne—but what we do here, they can have that in the community as well before they even come to us. Regional people come to us usually when there’s a problem, if they can’t give birth in their own communities. But the KMS service is there to help them while they’re in their community too, plus all their other organisations, you know, we can’t do what we do without them. It’s really important that we have that connection to the Aboriginal organisations because that’s where our patients come from. Both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal I might add, too. Non-Aboriginal women who are having Aboriginal babies are able to use both our services, Badjurr-Bulok Wilam and Baggarrook, because there’s a real special bond for non-Aboriginal women who live within the community, or who are having Aboriginal children. You know we need to keep them Aboriginal babies connected to their communities. And so KMS services in the regions have a really important role to do that too.

 

SH
I think I’d maybe add as a tangent to what Gina was saying that, absolutely for some Aboriginal families giving birth at a tertiary hospital or in a hospital setting is, you know, the best choice for them, that they’re happy to accept.

 

[music plays]

 

But it’s also important, I think, that hospitals don’t try and reinvent the wheel or white saviour these amazing Aboriginal caseload models, because when we speak about trust and we speak about models of care, they have already been existing in Aboriginal communities in the Aboriginal medical services. They’re well resourced, they’re well trusted, they’ve proven that possibly hospitals should look at more of their community partnerships and supporting community organisations, rather than trying to build from the ground up a service that sits within a hospital environment.

 

GB
Absolutely Storm.

 

Storm and Gina. It’s been incredible talking with you both, and I’d really like to thank you for sharing your work with us.

  

OUTRO
You can find more episodes, transcripts and links at
ruthdesouza.com/podcast. I’ll also add links to Storm and Gina’s work there. And if you enjoyed this episode, chuck us a rating or a review, wherever you listen to your podcasts. Next time on Birthing and Justice I’ll be talking with Donna Cormack in Te Whanganui-a-Tara in Aotearoa New Zealand. Donna has whakapapa to Kāi Tahu and Kāti Māmoe. Her research focuses on racism and its impacts on health.

 

DONNA CORMACK (guest) —
Our system is not designed to capture information about its own performance, or about the performance of providers, let alone more broadly about structural and societal determinants of health.

 

Birthing and Justice with Doctor Ruth De Souza is written and hosted by me, and recorded at my home on the traditional lands of the Boonwurrung people of the Eastern Kulin Nations. Sound design and mix by Jon Tjhia, artwork by Atong Atem, design by Ethan Tsang, theme music by Raquel Solier and produced and edited by the fabulous Jon Tjhia. Thanks so much for listening! Catch you again soon.

 

[music fades]

 

ANONYMOUS
This podcast is produced with the support of the RMIT University Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellowship Program.

 

END NOTES — Audio transcript edited and designed by Abbra Kotlarczyk, 2022. Note: t­­­­he purpose of this audio transcript is to provide a record and pathway towards accessing all Birthing and Justice conversations. Editorial decisions around the omission of certain words and non-verbal utterances have been made purely for stylistic purposes towards greater legibility, and do not infer a desired ethics of speech.