And so the conference had begun! First was the Opening Ceremony on the Sunday. Each country had a representative to carry their flag not unlike the Opening Ceremony of the Olympics! There were immense cheers when Australia came up firstly because there was 450 midwives attending from Australia; the largest contingent from ANY country and because our representative carried the Australian flag to fly but she was also draped in the Aboriginal and Torres Strait flags! There were midwives from all over the world from Nigeria to Japan to Ireland to the US and Argentina. It was really quite moving to see the pride that the midwives had in their countries, there was 3500 of all of us altogether!
We heard from the ICM (international confederation of midwives) president, our new Global Ambassador the First Lady of Nigeria, and of course there was representation of the Czech, folk dancing, acrobats, jazz singers and finished with all the midwives standing and singing One Love together. You could really hear the enthusiasm and passion of the midwives!
After that was the Welcome Reception which gave us an indication of Czech organisation. In a word; useless! They did not consider the deluge of 3500 hungry midwives and the organising of the catering was appalling! However there was wine so we were all happy enough.
The next day the sessions began in earnest. We heard outcomes of studies, policy changes, trails, the importance of education and what is the future of midwifery. These stories came from around the world and the hardest part of the conference was choosing which session to go see! We found out that incontinence is an epidemic with 70-80% of women not reporting it, the importance of discussing domestic violence with pregnant women, the amazing and extremely uphill work they are doing to reduce their exceptionally high caesarean section rate in the US (such simple measures with brilliant results), the travesty of The Netherlands, the country with the highest home birth rate now shifted to becoming highly medicalised due to negative press, the fact that all we have learnt about the female pelvis is wrong (in fact there is one muscle that doesn't even exist!!), how midwives need to be in the forefront of assisting women with mental health issues and the absolute importance of continuity of care. Whew! It was inspiring and made all of us want to run home and change the world!! (This may wear off very quickly once I actually start work). In amongst this we heard from various speakers about the new policies and goals in terms of improving maternal and newborn health in developing countries. Unfortunately many of the 2015 goals won't be reached, so we need to look to the future again.
The real highlight of the conference was my lovely friend Joy who did an excellent presentation on publicly funded home birth and the success of the programme at Sunshine Hospital in Victoria
And of course with a conference you have to have conference gala dinner and this coincided with Naomi's 30th birthday so we had a lovely night celebrating!
The conference overall was a fabulous experience and I'm definitely attending the next one in 2017 in Toronto!!!
(Unfortunately the photos are out of order because this blog thing is stupid sometimes!)
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