Editor:
As of March 25, babies will no longer be delivered in Banff. And yes, it’s an inconvenience for some families in town.
But I would like to take a minute and review what has been said about the closure.
People have voiced concern about how they will get to Canmore without a car? Yes, it’s a longer drive, but how do car-less people get to the hospital in larger cities from the suburbs… or even downtown? We have cabs and buses, and there’s nine months to add transportation to elaborate birthing plans.
I am gratful I will never have to deal with bumper-to-bumper traffic that can easily happen in Calgary during rush hour or having to drive on the dreaded Deerfoot Trail while in labour.
People have voiced concern about how they will drive the 10 minutes to Canmore in a snowstorm? We live in Alberta. Snow isn’t a new thing. Ask the people from Invermere, Golden, Lake Louise and Calgary how they drove to Banff in snowstorms to deliver their babies. They drove more than an hour in the snow.
People have said “just get more nurses who want to do obstetrics” and a quote by a B.C. doctor that “there is no specific number of deliveries nurses need to participate in, in order to maintain competency and confidence.”
Obstetrical nurses in larger hospitals solely do obstetrics. Every shift. Sometimes they experience multiple birthing moms in a shift. We had 50 births last year. That’s one birth for every 13 days. That’s almost one birth every two weeks. What are the chances of the same nurse getting multiple deliveries in succession to keep his/her skills up? How comfortable would a birthing mother and her partner be if her labour and delivery nurse hadn’t been part of a birth for a month? For two months? Longer?
A nurse recently said at a Town meeting that every nurse who graduates nursing school does obstetrics and graduates with the skills to do so. I graduated 12 years ago. I saw two deliveries in my four years of school. I was a deer in the headlights in that delivery room.
Today, I am more than competent in my chosen field, but it would be rather presumptuous of me to tell you that I would be comfortable in a delivery room because I “took it in school.”
People have said that Banff will lose its sense of community and won’t be able to retain young families because it will lose the maternity ward. Umm… Am I part of the only young family in town that’s noticed that despite mine and my husband’s decent paying jobs we will never be able to own a stand-alone house with a green space, available in most communities, because we cannot afford the 20 per cent down we need for our million dollar mortgage? Safe, quiet, affordable housing trumps a maternity ward in my decision to live in this beautiful town.
My sense of how great the Banff family community is came when I got home from the hospital with my babies. It came from the young families I met in town, the parent link, motoring munchkins, swimming lessons, library time, dayhome, Cascade Ponds, Norquay mommy ski days.
I don’t think all those great things will vanish with the loss of the maternity ward. I think our schools will remain full. And I don’t think my decision of having a third child will have anything to do with the fact that I’ll have to drive 10 more minutes to Canmore.
Gabrielle DeBaie BScN, RN, CPN(c),
Banff
