Darrell Greer
Northern News Services

Rankin Inlet (Nov 19/01) - It's a classic Catch 22.

A proper standard of clinical care has to be established at the Kivalliq Regional Birthing Centre before any form of local training can be provided.

But if Inuit women aren't soon trained as midwives, there may not be a regional birthing centre in the not-too-distant future.

The dilemma puts the Rankin Inlet centre dangerously close to a crisis situation. If no additional hires are found before Dec. 9, the centre will be down to one midwife and one maternity care worker on staff.

Midwife Samantha Schuster said earlier this month that the local training issue was raised at a recent public meeting concerning the birthing centre.

Schuster said the original plan was to have a mentoring program in place at the birthing centre.

The objective was to train as many women as possible as midwives. Eventually, the majority of staff at the centre would be local women.

"When the birthing centre became regional in May of 2000, they staffed it with three midwives," said Schuster.

"Part of the reason behind having three was to allow them to be part of a community-based learning program for local people. That number quickly dropped to two and now we're dropping to one," she said.

"It's difficult for us to be able to provide clinical care, let alone plan and execute an educational program."

The birthing centre began operating as a pilot project in October 1993.

It was evaluated by the University of Ottawa's faculty of nursing during parts of 1995 and 1996. It was upgraded to a program in 1996 and then a regional program last year.

Maternity care worker Nowyah Williams said staff turnover and burnout rates are extremely high.

She said the only long-term solution to the problem is to get back to the original plan of training Inuit women as midwives.

"If we train Inuit people to become midwives, we wouldn't have this constant recruitment process going on all the time," said Williams.

"It's very stressful here and we need to start training Inuit women -- not just thinking about training them, actually doing it."