Outspoken midwife told to remove post
A sick midwife who posted a heartfelt message about the horrific situations she came across in South Auckland has been forced to take it down.
Former Counties Manukau midwife Danielle Hart-Murray’s post describing the poor health of many children, young women impregnated by relatives and terrible living conditions went viral with 474 shares in the week since she posted it.
But yesterday she was contacted by her former employer, Counties Manukau District Health Board, and told to take it down because the DHB feared it was breaching confidentiality.
The board also told her the issue would be referred to the Midwifery Council.
Hart-Murray’s Facebook post explained that although she grew up in a low decile school in Tauranga and worked at a hospital in Vanuatu she was still shocked by what she saw while working for Middlemore Hospital.
Without naming anyone she described teenagers with “rickets, bronchiectasis from neglect, infections, damage from lifelong abuse and neglect, who have never had an education, have learning deficits because of it but also due to the environment to which they were subjected to in utero. Oh and they’re pregnant to their much older brother potentially, or their father, who knows.”
She wrote of the abuse of children from the time they were infants, middle-aged women born in New Zealand who needed interpreters because their parents were immigrants and they didn’t get an education, and a family of six who felt lucky their cousin was allowing them to stay in the single-car garage of the run-down state home he had just been given.
“Its old, cold, there’s no running water, rats and it’s mouldy,” HartMurray wrote of the garage. “The baby to come will sleep in the bed with the parents and three toddlers, unless I can find an alternative in time. At least the baby will be warm, but that’s not going to improve [the] atrocious rates of SUDI New Zealand has.
I don’t think a lot of New Zealand is aware of what really goes on for so many people here in Aotearoa. Danielle Hart-Murray
“It’s better than the relatives [sic] van in a dodgy carpark, where the parents take turns staying awake to protect them.”
Hart-Murray said she would pay for important prescriptions herself from time to time because many families could not afford them once they had paid for food.
One pregnant teenager she saw was forced to live with a relative in a house where she had to share a bed with two teenage boys and which had used needles and condoms on the floor and a pile of used adult nappies and human excrement in the house in lieu of a toilet.
The point of the post was to encourage people to remember they were voting not just for themselves but for what was best for the country — including the most deprived, she explained.
“I don’t think a lot of New Zealand is aware of what really goes on for so many people here in Aotearoa. It’s a largely hidden shame we’d rather not see.”
Hart-Murray is not working as a midwife because she had a benign tumour in her brain which had been successfully treated but was now dealing with cardiac trouble.
She said on her Facebook page that she had been overwhelmed by the response to the post from midwives who had the same story to tell.
Hart-Murray said she was unable to talk about it because of the complaint being laid. A Counties Manukau spokeswoman said HartMurray had been asked to remove the post out of concern it breached patient privacy.
“Staff members recognised the cases referred to in the post and Counties Manukau Health acted quickly to have the post removed.”
A Midwifery Council spokeswoman said it had not received a complaint.