Tighter rules aim to stop new midwives picking up 'bad habits'

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Rules on the mentoring of newly graduated midwives have been tightened to reduce the risk of picking up bad habits.

But the change has come only after the death of a baby and the revelation that the inexperienced midwife was being mentored by a midwife who was herself suspended.

Midwifery Council chief executive Sharron Cole said this week that the mentoring had slipped off-track in the case of Jennifer Rowan, the midwife for Linda Barlow, whose son Adam died shortly after he was born in October 2009. Changes were made as a result.

Failures by Ms Rowan and Waikato Hospital staff were blamed by coroner Gordon Matenga for Adam's death.

In her third and final year as a midwifery student at the Waikato Institute of Technology, Ms Rowan undertook clinical placements with an experienced community midwife in Hamilton, Colleen Hugill. Ms Rowan graduated in March 2009 and went to work with Ms Hugill, who became the new graduate's mentor under the Midwifery First Year of Practice programme which began in 2007.

Mrs Barlow engaged Ms Hugill as her midwife. However, Ms Hugill went on long-term sick leave in September 2009; she was also suspended by the council. Mrs Barlow switched to being cared for by Ms Rowan, without being told she was a new graduate.

Both midwives have been put through competence reviews by the council. Ms Hugill remains suspended and is understood to have gone overseas. Ms Rowan had conditions placed on her practice and she is on maternity leave from her employment at the Counties Manukau District Health Board.

Mrs Cole, when asked if Ms Rowan's mentoring was carried out properly, said: "It would be fair to say we agreed with what came out of the coroner's inquest, that no one could say it was satisfactory. That was not what mentoring means."

She said the first-year programme's rules had been changed so that a new graduate could not now be the practice-partner of, nor be mentored by a midwife with whom she or he had undertaken clinical placements as a student.

It was important, across the student/new-graduate period, to experience different clinical environments, so as to learn about "different midwives' varying approaches to safe midwifery practice" and not adopt the methods of those "not always practising to the highest standards".

Mentors risked losing objectivity and finding it difficult to give frank feedback, Mrs Cole said, if they had formed a long-term work relationship with a student/new graduate or if the person was their practice partner.