Hospital privileges for midwives in Brooks
As of July 1st Brooks Health Centre has officially granted Registered Midwives hospital privileges, which now gives women a choice of being able to have a Registered Midwife care for them at home or in hospital.
Brooks is the third hospital in southern Alberta to grant privileges to Midwives, together with Medicine Hat Regional Hospital and Cardston. Midwifery has been fully funded through Alberta Health since April 2009, for all Albertans with health care coverage.
A new midwifery practice, Prairie Rose Midwifery, is being established in the town of Brooks by Cherry MacLagan RM, who will be working with Terrie Shaw and Carissa Murray of ‘Midwives of Medicine Hat’. Together they are happy to be able to extend the area that they already cover around Medicine Hat to include Brooks, Bassano, Rosemary, Duchess, Patricia, Tilley, Rolling Hills, Vauxhall, Enchant, Scandia, Rainier and Bow City.
Cherry MacLagan arrived in Alberta in 1989, with the qualifications of RN and Registered Midwife from the U.K. She became a Registered Nurse in Alberta and worked in the Brooks hospital, while working with the Alberta Association of Midwives to get Midwifery recognized as a profession.
She spent several years working from her home in Rolling Hills providing midwifery care in the Brooks and surrounding areas and was one of the first Midwives to get registered back in 1998.
After a hiatus from practicing as a Midwife and working for a number of years in Medicine Hat Regional Hospital as a Registered Nurse on Labour and Delivery and in the low risk Family Medicine Maternity Clinic in MHRH, Cherry was approached by two Midwives who came to Medicine Hat from Ontario and who encouraged Cherry to return to practice with them.
So at the end of 2016, after completing a rigorous review process and refreshing a few skills, Cherry joined the practice of Midwives of Medicine Hat (MoMH) with midwife Terrie Shaw.
There are now three midwifery practices in the southeastern corner of Alberta, Midwives of Medicine Hat (Terrie Shaw, Cherry MacLagan and Carissa Murray), Grasslands Midwifery (Erin Giles), and now Prairie Rose Midwifery, Brooks. Shaw has worked in Alberta for many years as both a registered nurse and midwife and did the bridging midwifery program in Ontario before coming back to Alberta in 2015 and setting up MoMH. Carissa Murray, a New Registrant Midwife from the Mount Royal degree program in Calgary has just joined the practice as of July 1st.
Cherry will continue to work closely with MoMH, and Terrie and Carissa will also be providing back up for Prairie Rose Midwifery as well as covering some of the clinics, so the three midwives will continue to work as a team to support women in the area.
Prairie Rose Midwifery will currently be based at the walk-in clinic area in Newell Associate Clinic on 4th Street, Brooks, holding clinics each Wednesday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m.. Anyone interested in accessing midwifery care can do so by going to abmidwives.ca and follow the steps to ‘find a midwife’ and choose their practice of preference in order to get registered in the region of their choice.