Many women are reluctant to have students involved in their care, making it difficult for trainees to have adequate contact with obstetric and gynaecology patients, the Otago District Health Board's new women's health clinical director, Dr Alex Teare, says.
It was difficult for students and trainee specialists to get the chance to examine women patients and undertake "hands-on" procedures such as palpating a woman's abdomen during pregnancy to check on the progress of the baby, he said.
An education programme was needed to raise the profile of the teaching status of Dunedin Hospital in this area.
Making a decision about student involvement when women might be stressed or in pain was not ideal, so such a programme was needed in the community, he said; through general practitioners and midwives.
This would allow women the chance to think about the possibility of student involvement before they arrived at the hospital.
Dr Teare said he respected it was women's right to decline involvement, but felt more could be done to inform them about the value of such contact in the training of future generations of doctors.
It was not "guinea pig" or "experimental stuff", but a matter of trying to demonstrate to trainees what a normal pregnancy was and how it could change.
He suspected the decline in the number of women opting for student involvement over recent years was related to the emphasis on women having choices in pregnancy.
Dr Teare is also a senior clinical lecturer in obstetrics and gynaecology at the University of Otago.
• In his hospital role, Dr Teare replaced Dr Susan Fleming, who resigned this year because her husband had taken up a new job in Canada.
