Posts by Russell Brown
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Danyl Mclauchlan,
‘Mainsplaining’? Still? Really? Surely only ‘hysterical women’ use ad hominums like ‘mansplaining’.
This is not a useful direction for the discussion to take. I presume it's intended as humour, but it does not achieve its purpose. Back off, please.
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Sacha,
A misunderstanding perhaps. I meant “frame” as in the way George Lakoff and other theorists use it, not as the police might. And I meant in the finished article, not in the interview situation or elsewhere. Guililand was introduced to readers from the get-go as angry.
Because she was angry. It wasn’t Chisholm’s job to tell it any other way than it happened. You might be right that the Listener story offers a more balanced picture, but Guililand had the opportunity to offer a considered, balancing view and simply didn’t do that. And, frankly, the College of Midwives still hasn't offered a reasoned critique of the story, beyond declaring it to be full of unspecified "inaccuracies".
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Lucy Telfar Barnard,
Apart from anything else, if such monitoring had been introduced to start with, College of Midwives would have statistics to back up its assertions about the superiority of midwife care – and if those statistics didn’t back up its assertions, would presumably be able to improve its practices by looking at the circumstances in which outcomes were poor.
Yup. Karen Guililand would have been better advised to have talked about this, rather than dismissing the whole debate. She apparently apologised to Chisholm for the nature of the two and a half hour interview, but the College of Midwives needs better representation than it got there.
I was a bit snippy with Sacha yesterday about this, but I was aware of what had happened in the interview and the idea that Chisholm set out to frame Guililand as an "angry woman" is just unfair to the journalist.
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Meanwhile, back to Marvel Grill at Wynyard Quarter.
Friends went there last night: Late, undercooked mains, terrible service (one of them had a tray of drinks spilt on him) and a bill that bore little relation to what had actually been ordered. Half the group walked away without paying when the split bill mysteriously doubled after half of it had been had been paid.
The owner was there and told my friend he "didn't give a fuck about the internet" when a potential review was discussed. Wow.
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Sacha,
She was framed explicitly from the outset as an angry woman.
Does it occur to you that that might actually have been all Chisholm had to work with? It is not her job to make someone look good when they weren't.
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Sacha,
I guess I’m also influenced by the knowledge that Chisholm has bloody good journalistic judgement, and a long record of dealing with with scientific issues in her stories.
Apart from anything else, I get the impression that had she really been intending to write anti-feminist stitch-up, her hour-long interview with Guililand gave her plenty of material. But she didn’t go that way.
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Anyway, gotta run and do the show.
As I noted in the the original post, the result of our n=1 study was that a home birth with a midwife was good and emotionally satisfying (and that's very important) and I don't regret doing it for a second.
Our hospital experience was not as satisfying -- but I do sometimes wonder what could have happened if that birth had taken place outside a hospital.
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Sacha,
And p46 of the article notes that the rate of HDC complaints is proportionally higher about obstetricians than midwives.
From a very small sample on the specific issue of code of rights complaints -- which aren't the same thing as medical outcomes.
From the last batch of 44 complaints about obstetricians, one was upheld. From the 97 complaints against midwives, five were upheld. So you could also say that complaints against midwives are more than twice as likely to be upheld as complaints against doctors.
The magazine’s framing of the story concerns me more than the detail, frankly
I disagree.
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Hard News: Complaint and culture, in reply to Sacha,
Which takes us back to the North&South article. Where is the emphasis when the cover has the word ‘Midwives’ blazing on it and the whole beginning of the story is about only their alleged failings? It’s hardly neutral territory given the history
But the big change was autonomy for midwives. There are now only about 30 obstetric GPs in the whole country; 3000 midwives and 225 obstetricians. ACC treatment claims for maternity care out of proportion to their share of all medical treatments. A Canterbury University (by an economist, mind you) that found having a GP not a midwife reduced infant mortality by 10%. A doubling of the proportion of live births that result in hospital admissions between 1999 and 2007.
The is evidence the other way too. But if you’re going to talk about the impact of the changes, you do have to talk about what the changes look like.
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Hard News: Auckland City Nights, in reply to Christopher Dempsey,
And c) NZTA would be interested, if it were feasible (and I suspect if Joyce could back-the-f**k-off from NZTA and let them build cycleways)
Arrrggh. NZTA building cycleways alongside roads has been an amazing development. Seriously, what the fuck is wrong with Joyce?
NZTA would consider linking the old Nelson St off-ramp to the cycle path they would like to build linking the end of the Northwestern Cycle path to Wellesley St/Beach Rd. How cool would that be? You’d be able to cycle up Hobson, nip onto that old ramp and get onto the Northwestern Cycle path in no time at all!
Two words:
"Yeah" and "baby".