LEGISLATION stipulating the number of midwives employed at hospitals and clinics is unconstitutional because it only affects the private sector, the head of the Gynaecological Association has said.

Dr George Leontiades said efforts by the House Health Committee to specify how many midwives worked at private hospitals and clinics completely overlooked state health institutions and was therefore “as far as I’m concerned unconstitutional”.

In fact if the law came into effect in 2011 following its recent one-year deferral, the association planned to go to court over the issue, he said.

The gynaecologist said at present 70 per cent of all births was handled by obstetricians and not midwives. Even if there were more midwives, expectant mothers using the private sector would still want to use a doctor, therefore reducing midwives to a supportive role.

“In the last 50 years no government has bothered to create a midwifery school. Every four or five years they create a school to train about 40 nurses in midwifery for one year and then they are employed by the state hospitals.”

Leontiades said the state had never once tried to ensure there were adequate numbers of nurses to become midwives.

“Then one day they drew up this legislation which only affects private clinics and hospitals and not the government.”

He said the law drawn up had put clinics under tremendous pressure to conform and would result in a large portion of them closing if forced to implement its stipulations.

His believes the law’s aim is to concentrate the private sector into a few large private hospitals after getting rid of smaller private institutions.

“When this legislation was drawn up they knew full well we had no midwives,” he said.

Under the new law a clinic had to have a minimum of at least three midwives, one for every shift, he said.

The justification that the new law was based on British and UK legislation was utterly bogus because neither country stipulated how many midwives had to be employed at facilities nor did their legislation say a hospital had to close down because of a shortage of midwifery staff, he added.

Leontiades said parliament had drawn up this bill without coming up with any solutions as to how private institutions were supposed to fill the posts.

He said telling them to employ staff from abroad was pointless since midwife shortages was a common problem throughout the world and that repeated efforts to find more midwives had failed.

“They simply do not exist,” he said.

Even more unfair, he said, was the fact that no one inspected state hospitals or the number of midwives they had employed at any given time.

“At least twice a year inspectors are sent to see if the law is in effect at private institutions, but not one is sent to government hospitals,” he said.

The only people who could possibly benefit from this new law were the existing midwives who could ask for more money because they were in high demand.

“Unless they want to shut us down. If that’s the case they should have the courage to say so and to compensate us and let us go home,” he said.

Leontiades said the private clinics and gynaecologists planned to wait until next year and if the law was brought into force they would take the matter to court.

“We’ll tell them there’s this legislation that only affects the private sector and not the government sector and how we’ve done everything to comply and simply cannot.”