@mariner4life said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@kirwan said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@no-quarter said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@kirwan said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@donsteppa said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@gt12 said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@canefan said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
@donsteppa said in Coronavirus - New Zealand:
The reforms of the early to mid 90's brought down the average nights stayed in hospital significantly for various situations... for better or worse...
I vaguely recall a stat that new mothers used to stay in hospital an average seven nights after giving birth, until the Crown Health Enterprise reforms of the hospitals, which was eventually down to 1-2 nights.
That stat is about right. In fact for a routine birth they encourage you to leave immediately and head to another facility like birthcare
Which is a fucking incredibly good example of how little NZ government/bureacracy gives a fuck about actual people. My wife had about 10 days in hospital following her C-section (it's about 5 for a regular birth) and they taught her how to be a mother, how to feed, change, deal with screaming etc. etc.
Seems to have gone down the midwife at home model for post-birth support. Someone I know from school has been very active in the 'childbirth is not a medical event' movement (or whatever they call it) in recent years in staunch support of home births.
People have forgotten how dangerous childbirth can be for the mother or the child. You don't have time to fuck around when the cord is wrapped around a kids neck (which happened to us).
If we were home, and had to wait for an ambulance, get to hospital, get a surgeon, emergency c-section, my daughter would have died or suffered significant brain damage.
Being in hospital for child birth is a good thing.
I'm still traumatised by that experience and I was in the hospital (at 3am, wife unconscious and with me with the baby). And I was in Lower Hutt!
I won't go into details but my wife would have died if we weren't in hospital for our first son. Home births are a fucking idiotic risk to take.
And mothers are put under huge pressure to have them. I had to watch a midwife arguing with a doctor in front of my wife for the first kid. I just talked over them both and said what I wanted to have happen (doctor lead birth). Didn't make a new friend.
look, while i respect a lot about what they do
i have no time for midwives after the breastfeeding bullshit we were put through with our first. And stories like this seem to suggest the entire profession has been taken over by a particular ideology, and that trumps the actual people involved.
Oh yeah - we had real trouble here, wife had trouble with her milk coming in and the entire experience just made her feel like a failure of a mother over something she had no control over. In the end a Plunket nurse just whispered to her "I'm not supposed to tell you this, but just give the baby formula".
And magically problem solved...
And also having a baby on formula meant I could actually spend some time with the little nipper, wife would go to bed at a reasonable hour and I would stay up and do the late night feed. Wife would get a good sleep and I could actually spend some time bonding with the baby and actually helping out instead of the wife having to bear it all.
I truly do not have a bad thing to say about putting a baby on formula, especially in our case when the wife milk just wasn't happening. So much better than seeing so called "experts" who do nothing but waste your time and achieve (&$^# all aside from making your wife feel horrible.
So honestly (&%^ them all - aside from that lovely Plunket nurse 🙂