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[Larissa & Tim Inns]

here is the full transcript. Sorry about that! Larissa     Doctors attack hospital plan for new mums By Health Reporter JILL PENGELLEY 17apr02 NEW mothers are being encouraged to leave an Adelaide hospital the day they give birth in exchange for 36 hours of help in the home. However, the pilot scheme at the Lyell McEwin hospital has been branded as "appalling" by the Australian Medical Association. The average length of stay after a non-surgical delivery in a public hospital is 2.89 days but, under the new scheme, women are allowed to go home within four hours. Their home helpers are 21 previously long-term unemployed young women from the northern suburbs. With six months' training through the University of South Australia, they spend six hours a day for six days providing help ranging from breastfeeding advice to dish washing. AMA vice-president and Adelaide obstetrician Trevor Mudge said yesterday the trade-off was "ludicrous". "To leave on day one and to replace professional care with care by someone trained for six months is ludicrous in the extreme," he said. "It's appalling, isn't it? "To trumpet this as a new advance in health care delivery is mischievous, to say the least." Lyell McEwin chief executive Paul Gardner said saving money was one aim of the project. Women who accepted the offer of home help would cost the hospital less by leaving early. "I guess you could call it a carrot but, on the other hand, it's entirely voluntary," he said. The Mothercarers pilot program is a partnership between several groups, including the Human Services Department and the Foundation for Young Australians which provided funding and criteria for employing the young women. They stipulated that they should be aged 18 to 25 and had never held a job. Mr Gardner said many of the young carers were mothers themselves. Their training included: LEARNING how to advise on breastfeeding. COOKING skills. BATHING and handling a baby. OBSERVING any physical and emotional signs of ill health in the mother and baby. LEARNING about the range of community support programs available to the mother. Mothers who used home help would still receive a 10-minute visit from a midwife each day for the first five days. The head of the hospital's women's and children's division, Professor Gus Dekker, proposed the trial based on his experience in The Netherlands. When he had come to Australia he had been "flabbergasted" to see women hospitalised for childbirth. "You basically transform a completely healthy mother and her newborn into patients when they're not sick," he said. Professor Dekker said the program's first aim was improved care, the second was providing jobs and the third was saving money. The hospital had about 1600 deliveries a year, but 2600 would be needed to make the scheme cost-neutral, he said. The medical chief of the Women's and Children's Hospital's women's and babies' division, Dr Ross Sweet, said he would "have a good, hard look" at the trial's results. "I think it's a wonderful idea but it needs to be very carefully done in terms of selecting and screening carers," he said. Health Minister Lea Stevens said the program was "fantastic" and praised Holden for lending a fleet of cars for the carers to use in the trial.     "How can you have too many babies? That's like having too many flowers." ~Mother Theresa~