FAQ's 

A self-employed midwife (or LMC midwife) looks after you during your pregnancy, at birth, and up to 4-6 weeks after pepi is born. 

Your midwife is responsible for your hauora along this journey, and also the hauora of your pepi. They are more importantly responsible to empower you to be the keeper of your health and empower you to make informed decisons about your health.

Your midwife will give you lots of information so that you know what to expect, they will order blood tests and scans, they may refer you to your GP or a hospital service like an obstetrician too. Your midwife can also refer you to support services if thats needed.

Your midwife is responsible for the care of between 40-50 wahine and their pepi over a year, their week usually consists of home visits for mama who have given birth, clinic appointments for mama who still have pepi on board, any emergency situations, labour and births, meetings with other health professionals, study days to keep their skills up, and days worth of paperwork. 

No! You should never have to pay to see your midwife. Our services are free to you if you fit the eligible criteria, either born here or are a permanent resident.

But, not every scan or other test is free. Most of the time you have to pay for services like scans, physios, GP visits and prescriptions. Unfortunately, we have no control over what other health services charge.

There has been a midwife shortage for a long time. For both hospital midwives and LMC midwives, we have severe understaffing.

Unfortunately, midwives are underpaid for the work they do, and are in negotiations for better pay and work conditions. We work long hours, all times of the day and night, weekends, and over public holidays. We miss out on whanau birthdays, weddings, christmas and most important life events due to our jobs. 

Although LMC midwives are paid by the government, we are technically self-employed which means we have higher tax rates and we only get paid for the work we are contracted for. For example, if you need to see us more often in pregnancy or you need us to come see you at home in early labour many times, we don't get paid for that. But we will do it if you need. We also have to pay for all our equipment, clinic rent, and study days out of our own pocket, which usually costs up to half of our income.

Most of these things have forced midwives to leave the country and practice overseas, or find a new profession. Some midwives have had to cut down the amount of mama they look after in a year to make sure they don't burn out from the amount of work we do (often unseen).

Most of the time you will only see your main midwife during your pregnancy, but if you want to meet the other midwives that may end up looking after you at some point, you can ask and we can arrange a meet up hui at one of your appointments in clinic.

We are a whanau at Kaitiaki Midwives, so most likely you will meet us all at some point or other.

You will need to save the phone number of your midwife in your phone for emergencies. We prefer a text during work hours (8am-4pm) for non-emergencies. We will text you back when we have a chance, or the next business day.

In any emergency (see the matauranga page for emergency list), please always call us no matter what time of the day or night. If your midwife is on a weekend off call or is on a sleep break from being up for too long, their voicemail will have the phone number of the midwife covering them.

Midwives are on call 24/7 - but only for emergencies or births. If your call isn't an emergency or you aren't in labour, be mindful that we may have just been up for 48 hours at a birth or an emergency.

At your first appointment with your midwife there's lots of talking. The best thing you can do is read our matauranga page and make sure you look at the block where you are up to. We cover things like healthly eating and lifestyle choices, medical and maternity history, any special care plans we need to have for you, weight gain in pregnancy, what tests are coming up and what the results of your first tests were.

At every appointment we need to do your blood pressure, check your mimi (urine), check in on your weight, go over recent tests, double check you have read the next learning block, listen to pepi, and measure your whare tangata (uterus).

The first appointment usually takes an hour, every other appointment is usually 30mins or less depending on what needs to be checked.

If you feel that you need longer appointments, please let your midwife know.

After pepi is born, your midwife will see you in hospital. Once you go home, you may have another midwife from our practice see you.

They will let you know a rough time when they will come over and on what days, they will weigh baby, chat with you about how feeding is going and how you are. Some visits will be longer than others as at 1 week and 4-6 weeks old, your midwife will need to do a full top to toe of pepi. This includes measuring their length and checking their eyes and hips etc.

Once your baby is gaining weight regularly, your midwife will refer you to a well child provider who sees you and pepi from about 5 weeks old up to 5 years old. You will also go and see your Dr or GP at about 6 weeks old for baby checks.