Opening a mother and child hub in Wanaka will not address the region's main problem - a lack of midwives - a community group says.
Save Our Wanaka Midwives - a group founded earlier this year after the town was reduced to a single full-time midwife - lobbied the Southern District Health Board for Wanaka to have a primary birthing unit as part of its review of maternity services in the DHB region.
Instead, Wanaka will have a mother and child hub - a facility a step below, which can be used for births in an emergency and which can be upgraded to a unit if required.
The SDHB review left open the possibility of Wanaka having a primary birthing unit: there is one in Alexandra, and a further review will assess if it can serve Wanaka adequately.
"It's difficult to see how the hub will improve our midwives current situation,'' spokeswoman Kristi James said.
"A hub does go a small way towards addressing lead maternity carer midwives' poor pay by helping with some costs, but it doesn't go far enough.''
Wanaka has one full-time LMC midwife now: the area has 200+ births a year and needed at least four midwives, Ms James said.
"One midwife cannot continue to do the job that four (or more) midwives should be doing.
"It is not safe, it is not sustainable, it puts Wanaka mothers and Wanaka babies in danger.''
SOWM began campaigning for better midwifery care in Wanaka earlier this year, when just one full-time midwife remained in the region.
A stop-gap measure saw two interim locum midwives appointed, but their contracts end in September.
"Our one full-time LMC is fully booked right though to the end of March 2019, but has no clarification of whether she will have the support she needs to care for those women,'' Ms James said.
"Wanaka remains in a dire situation, no better off than we were back at the start of the year: in fact, some argue that we are in a worse predicament.''
The SDHB maternity review included a sustainability package designed to help LMCs caring for women in remote rural locations.
They will receive additional payment of $300 per woman from the SDHB, regardless of whether the woman births locally or travels to a main centre for the birth.
"This aims to go some way to recognise the additional support they provide when compared to their urban counterparts,'' the review said.
Ms Gray said the package did not do enough to address the problem.
When the review was launched SDHB strategy, primary and community executive director Lisa Gestro told the Otago Daily Times that the package was "as it stands'', but midwives had raised concerns about it, and the DHB was prepared to reconsider it.
"We will be running a campaign nationally to try and recruit LMCs in to our area,'' Mrs Gestro said.
"But if you look around our area there are a large number of LMCs who, with the right incentive package and the right set of conditions, would be quite happy to return to work.
"Our focus needs to be on both of those approaches.''
The board was committed to "getting it right'' and wanted to work with the Ministry of Health to develop a long-term, sustainable package, Mrs Gestro said.
"I don't think that we can pretend that what we are proposing is going to be enough in the future, so really that needs to be a partnership between us and the Ministry, and certainly that discussion is under way.''
