NCW focus on at risk services
This year we celebrate 125 years since women won the vote in New Zealand. That achievement, way back in 1893, was the result of tireless work by many women campaigners led by Kate Sheppard whose face adorns our $10 note.
Having won the vote the campaigners then set up the National Council of Women to hold what was then a Parliament entirely made up of men to account when it came to the needs of women and children.
Over a century members of NCW have burrowed down into proposed laws looking at the effects these would have on women and children – and often succeeding in having them modified.
Today, we have become more conscious of the fact that no matter how just the cause, there are forces at work in our society which deny many Kiwis a fair go.
The broad term for this is unconscious bias and its effect is to blight dreams and ambitions of many and deprive our society of the dynamism a truly diverse culture can bestow.
So more recently NCW has put some of its resources into progressing gender equality, setting up Gender Equal NZ and looking at issues like the gap between wages paid to men and women doing similar jobs and how to free men imprisoned in brutish stereotypes where they risk ridicule from their mates for showing their gentle side.
Well, two events recently have forced home a growing awareness of another kind of inequity in our society: geographic or population inequity.
At our recent branch meeting in Invercargill two issues dominated: the futures of the Lumsden Maternity Centre and the Te Anau-based helicopter ambulance service.
As reported in this paper a proposal to change the Lumsden Maternity Centre from an in-patient primary birthing unit to a maternal and child hub, met with such stern resistance from Southlanders, including 200 submissions and 5000 signatories to a petition, that the Southern District Health Board extended its consultation period and is now due to release its new proposals.
Allied to these concerns, also raised at the meeting was a proposal to withdraw the helicopter ambulance base in Te Anau in favour of centralised air rescue services.
Members described these events as part of the downgrading of services in rural communities and talked of how a preponderance of population-based funding discriminated against folk who chose to call Southland home.
They said population-based funding will always discriminate against a province such as Southland’s and that mums and babes through-out the whole country deserve consistency of care, with entitlement to the same number of pre-birth assessments and check ups.
‘‘Rural women should have access to the same level of service as their metropolitan sisters,’’ commented one member.
Some also questioned the rationale for the SDHB even considering changes to the maternity service in Lumsden, saying the proposal was based on flawed data on the number of women using the centre and the geographic area it services.
Women from Queenstown and Te Anau are choosing to have their babies at Lumsden.
Linking the two proposals together another member mentioned that if air ambulance services were moved to Queenstown, and the maternity centre was to became a post natal hub, women from north of Lumsden would have a long trip either in their own vehicle or by ambulance to the nearest birthing centre, compromising the golden hour of life-saving medical help.
Another member suggested it was an issue where the SDHB and the local community could sit down and work it out together with a genuine commitment to reach a goal which provided local services.