Andrea, Joy, Trish, Nigel, Cathy, Leone and any others I may have missed, thank you for your comments re ANF. I absolutely agree with you all. ACMI ideally should be the industrial arm for midwives and as Joy said we should be taking responsibility for defining midwifery. I believe we are defining midwifery and this is where the issue with ANF has become problematic. As Trish suggested - we could all withdraw from ANF however in SA we do not have another union, we did, the Public Service Union, but they pulled out from representing nurses and midwives a few years ago. If we have our own industrial body we could do without ANF. In GB the Royal College of Midwives also is the industrial body for Midwives, in NZ the College of Midwives is not the industrial body, however, they do offer a service to support midwives in terms of professional misconduct, and they have the Nurses Union to represent them for work place agreements. The NZ College of Midwives have negotiated with Nurses Union for adequate represenataion for midwives. As Andrea said the ANF belongs to the members and all those midwives who are members may like to have a say about this issue. Many midwife members of ANF in SA have written letters to ANF. Those who are not members have also written to say why they are not members and even that did not make a dent in their Annual State Delegates Conference decision. The problem is the Institutions defer to ANF for their industrial issues regarding employment, pay rates etc.ect. In fact a Director of a large maternity hospital in Adelaide has publicly stated she would employ direct entry midwives providing there is an adequate award. If ANF maintain their stand of opposing Direct Entry we will have problems related to these graduates being employed. A lot of work would need to be done to have the ACMI respresent us industrially, however there would be enormous benefits to all of us including increasing the membership I would suggest. Jen Byrne Coordinator of Midwifery Flinders University GPO Box 2100 Adelaide SA 5001 -- This mailing list is sponsored by ACE Graphics. Visit <http://www.acegraphics.com.au> to subscribe or unsubscribe.
