Prague, Oct 3 (CTK) – Doctors may be replaced by expert midwives at childbirth, daily Mlada fronta Dnes (MfD) wrote Saturday in connection with the opening of a new masters degree programme at the 1st Medical Faculty of Charles University in Prague.
The study programme will be organised in cooperation with Prague’s maternity hospital U Apolinare.
“This is great news. It is little known that a doctor is not needed at all during in most cases of giving birth that proceed in a standard way. The doctor usually comes only after the baby is born in order to control the baby according to the rules,” said midwife Katerina Sojakova who is going to join the new MA programme for midwives.
“We want to train skillful midwives who will be partners of the doctors. In fact, they will be doctors without the usual title MUDr,” obstetrician Antonin Parizek, from the U Apolinare maternity hospital, said.
Aleksi Sedo, dean of the 1st Medical Faculty, said the midwife study programme has been prepared according to the demands of the World Health Organisation and the European Union.
MfD writes that the first Czech university programme for midwives started in 1922 and now this tradition will be renewed.
Expert midwives open the issue of legal home births in the Czech Republic, MfD writes.
But the law will not give the midwives the right to bear responsibility for home births, it adds.
The Czech Republic has 4000 midwives, officially known as childbirth assistants. According to a law from 2012, midwives face a fine of up to one million crowns if they attend home births and fail to meet strict conditions set in such a way that they in fact cannot be met in the country, the paper writes.
Parizek said it seemed strange they all women speak of wanting to give birth naturally, but when they are giving birth, they all want painkillers.
This may be true, yet it is clear that women want childbirth to be personal: they want pain relief, but at the same time respect, decency and responsiveness to their wishes, the paper writes.
Parizek argues that many births seemed simple but did not end well.
However, no statistical data on home births in the Czech Republic are available, MfD writes.
