A midwife can do everything “right” and still walk away feeling like they’ve failed, not because of skill, but because the system makes the right care impossible. That feeling has a name: moral distress. We’re joined by Wendy Foster, a midwife, educator, researcher and union advocate, to unpack how moral distress shows up in Australian maternity care and why it matters for burnout, workforce retention, and women’s experiences of birth.
We trace Wendy’s path from direct-entry midwifery to rural and regional practice, then into education, where she starts noticing how training structures can pull students away from woman-centred care. We talk continuity of care requirements, the hidden workload of “chasing numbers”, and why the real costs land as time, fatigue and money. Wendy also shares how an unexpected health detour sparked an honours deep dive into magnesium and diabetes links, and how research skills still pay off even when a study can’t be completed.
From there, the conversation moves into the research that helped shift national thinking on placement payments, and into the work she now does with the Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation (ANMF), including enterprise bargaining issues like workload recognition and the push for fairer professional conditions. We finish with the simplest (and hardest) reset: start by finding out what’s important to women, then rebuild policy and service design around choice and relationships.
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