Introducing Find Your Midwife

Introducing Find Your Midwife

Find Your Midwife is a new website service that enables pregnant women to find a midwife with just a few taps on a screen or clicks of a mouse.

Midwives post their professional profiles on Find Your Midwife and regularly update their details so that women can locate them and find out whether they will be available on their due date. The site includes a due-date calculator so women can work out when their baby is due if they do not know already. 

The service has been developed by the New Zealand College of Midwives with funding from the Ministry of Health.

Visit the website www.findyourmidwife.co.nz now to see how user-friendly the service is.

Women can quickly locate local midwives available on their due date, rather than having to make multiple telephone calls. The midwife listings include short profiles that explain how they practice. The site also allows women to search according to the place they wish to give birth whether that is a hospital, birthing unit or at home.   

Find Your Midwife grew from a service developed for women and midwives in Otago by midwife Carrie van Rij and her husband Mark, a computer programmer.  At 32, Carrie has grown up with the internet and, when speaking to women who said they had telephoned up to 10 midwives before finding one who could take them as clients she thought “there must be a better way”. She and Mark combined their skills and with support from the local region of the New Zealand College of Midwives launched a service for Otago women.

The College has now developed the service as a national one in conjunction with the Ministry of Health.  The site is already proving a great success averaging over 1000 hits per week.

New Zealand is fortunate in having a state-funded maternity service that offers women one-to-one continuity of care throughout pregnancy, labour and birth. Most women are cared for by a midwife who is a Lead Maternity Carer. Find Your Midwife offers a quick, easy way for women to find these midwives who work from practices in their communities in conjunction with other health professionals who may need to be involved in care during pregnancy.  

Sathiya Muralidaran of Christchurch was one of the first women in New Zealand to find a midwife using the service. Sathiya says Find Your Midwife was “very useful”. She quickly spotted a profile for Christchurch midwife Yvonne Hiskemuller who looked friendly and welcoming. Sathya was also attracted to Yvonne because her photograph, taken while travelling in India.

“I am of Indian origin,” explains Sathiya “and I felt that she would have an understanding of different ethnicities”. Sathiya sent a message to Yvonne who responded the next day.

Background information on Find Your Midwife, midwives and maternity services in New Zealand are included in attached release.

ENDS

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