The Mission Midwives clinic will be significantly losing capacity in Fall, as two of its “baby catchers” step away from the practice, further shaking the available health services for future mothers in the community.
Like the maternity clinic, which announced its closure on April 1, the midwifery clinic cites long standing recruitment issues.
“It’s been almost two years now trying to attract people to our clinic,” said Cindy Penner, office manager and instructor at the clinic.
“We run a good clinic, it’s awesome, but we can’t recruit anyone.”
Midwives generally take smaller patient loads than physicians due to longer, more personalized visits, Penner said, and each of their three midwives can take 60 expectant moms a year.
But their total capacity is about to shrink by two-thirds.
READ: Mission Maternity Clinic closure
They normally operate with four midwives, but they lost one during the pandemic, another is going on maternity leave, and one is retiring. By September, they will only have one full-time midwife left.
She said the news of the maternity clinic closing down was “frustrating” because the collaboration between doctors and midwives in Mission was working well.
While Mission Midwives is not at immediate risk of folding as their remaining midwife has deep roots in the community, Penner called the increasing shortage “pretty alarming.”
“We will probably be a one-pony show until we can recruit more midwives,” she said, but added they’ve only managed two interviews in the last two years.
Shannon Ruley, the clinic’s last remaining midwife come September, comes from a local medical family. Dr. Humes Memorial Park gets its namesake from her grandfather.
“This community needs some kind of local maternity care,” Ruley said. “It can’t just be me, because there’s some people that are at higher risk and need to see a doctor.”
Abbotsford’s clinic is facing a similar shortage, said Alescia Richardson, midwife with the West Coast Health Collective. She said they’ve never had trouble hiring before this year, and normally have between four and six midwives working; in September, they will be down to two.
“This is really odd for us to lose as many midwives as we have in the last year,” Richardson said. “This is the first year we haven’t even received an application.”
She said some midwives are leaving the profession due to: burn out, unfair pay, and a lack of benefits; the Midwives Association of BC has been negotiating with the province for two years to increase benefits.
Becoming a midwife requires a four-year program at UBC, one of only five places in Canada to earn the degree. There are 16 to 20 new graduates and 90 to 110 new applicants annually, according to Cecilia Jevitt, UBC’s midwifery program director, making it highly competitive.
She said the profession was only legalized in Canada in 1998, and there are approximately 350 registered midwives across the province, but they tend to concentrate around population centres.
Penner said that unlike nursing, the degree is so specialized it’s hard to translate into other career paths. She said there just aren’t enough midwives to hire.
Currently, if women do not secure a midwife within three weeks of finding out they are pregnant, it’s nearly impossible, according to Penner.
Richardson said that sometimes midwives find out about pregnancies before spouses.
“The joke is: you pee on a stick, you call for a midwife,” she said.
It’s been a long road for the Mission Midwives clinic to become a busy practice.
When they opened 15 years ago, Penner said it was really a doctor-focused community, and it took time to build the trust.
She said she worries the trust will erode if residents lose access over the next couple years.
“I just want the community to know that we really, really care about them, like a lot. And that when we can’t take them, it’s not because we don’t want to,” Penner said.