House of Representatives
Dear Editor: Watching Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dance makes me try a few new moves, happy moves about the new composition of the formerly stodgy House of Representatives. It is not a stereotype to state that with Latina representatives, our government is going to be enlivened as never before. We should be encouraging Latino immigration so that we have enough friends of Ocasio-Cortez’s heritage to teach us how to move like that. If we can get half that happy, we are sure to shake our thoughts into more humane shape.
The increase of Native Americans in Congress also will take us to better places. Living in Bethel, King Cove, Sand Point, Mountain View in Anchorage, and in Sitka taught me that Native American representatives will make our government grow its heart. My many friends in the towns I just mentioned have shown me strong feelings of belonging together and of loyalty and respect that we badly need to improve within the general mix of society. Our government’s ongoing shortfall in these ways of feeling is damaging us in the eyes of the world and in our national spirit. It is good to have new help.
I do not mean to leave out other groups or to imply that the Latinos or Native Americans do not also bring formidable intellectual skills to our government, but new good tidings should be shouted out.
John Welsh, Sitka
Sitka NEST
Dear Editor: This is an open letter to the Assembly members.
As the negotiations continue to sell our public community hospital into the hands of a private corporation, now is the time to ensure that Sitka’s future generations will have some choice in the care they receive.
Many women in Sitka are particularly concerned about the lack of patient-centered options and lack of continuity of care provided for them and their families during pregnancy and birth. Pregnancy and birth is a physically and emotionally vulnerable time for women and families. Most women are inherently private, with sharing of intimate information and internal pelvic exams not necessarily being a comfortable or chosen experience. For some, the mere anticipation of labor and birth evokes primal fear, influenced by media portrayals of labor as suffering, negative stories told by friends or family, and the general paradigm of industrialized medicine that lacks consistent comfort and reassurance.
About 59 percent of adult women in Alaska have experienced intimate partner violence, sexual violence or both, in their lifetime. Nearly 12 percent have experienced intimate partner violence, sexual violence or both, in the past year. About 37 percent of adult women in the Alaska have experienced sexual violence in their lifetime, and about 48 percent have experienced intimate partner violence in their lifetime. (http://www.staralaska.com/statistics.html)
So, understandably, pregnancy and birth is an important time to have continuity of care, respect for personal privacy, and a trusted care provider who specializes in woman-centered care. Midwives are health care professionals ideally suited to provide this continuity, respect and trust. Yet, sadly, Sitka women do not have an option to have midwifery care, and SEARHC has shown opposition to including midwives in their obstetric service.
The SEARHC service plan provides a physician-centered model of care where women see a host of different doctors at prenatal visits then are attended by whomever is on call for delivery, which could be a hospitalist MD that the woman has never met. SEARHC’s rationale is that all of the family practice doctors (who are not women’s health care specialists) need to be able to attend deliveries, while having a convenient schedule that allows them minimal on-call time. SEARHC administration theorizes that if doctors aren’t able to deliver babies while maintaining their chosen lifestyle, they won’t be able to recruit/retain physicians. In a trauma-informed community such as Sitka, an approach that insists on putting providers’ lifestyles before the needs of women is ethically indefensible. Ethics aside, fragmented care with 5-7 providers is simply poor medical practice – fraught with potential for mixed messages, missing information, need for patients to repeat their intimate sexual history, lack of consistent education, and possibly unnecessary vaginal exams.
So, here we are at a crossroads, about to hand over our most vulnerable community members to a system that admits to placing patient-centered care as low priority.
Solutions exist outside of the binary physicians vs. midwives duality and power struggle that SEARHC has chosen to maintain. This is not the 1400s, nor the 1940s. Midwives are not a threat to SEARHC’s existence. Midwives are a necessary, vital missing piece to the available health care options in Sitka.
There are multiple solutions to the issue, and it is time to listen to the women of Sitka. More than half of the women of Sitka prefer midwifery care. We are not here to fight; we are here to advocate for women and to share our feelings. In Anchorage, Providence and ANMC both utilize Certified Nurse Midwives (CNMs) within the hospital. Providence offers birth center midwives privileges so that they are able to follow their patient and continue as primary provider if transfer to the hospital is necessary.
We are asking you, our elected representatives, to please protect the most vulnerable members of our community.
Now is the time to negotiate for the benefit of future generations and recognize that the future of our community depends on having quality health care, including options outside the SEARHC system. The community of Sitka may support and create an independent birth center in the future. Now is the time to ensure, in writing, that independent practitioners will have access to utilize services such as ultrasound and laboratory necessary to maintain the standard of quality prenatal care.
We, the undersigned, request the Assembly and City negotiators to incorporate language to enable autonomous health care providers to exist and function in Sitka in the future. We ask that legal contractual agreements be included in the SEARHC/SCH sale to preserve access for independent community health care providers, specifically providing midwifery care providers access and privileges in the SEARHC system. We request that a public disclosure of written agreements in this regard shall be made, and the Assembly address the issue as a published agenda item at a meeting open to the public, with open discussion and public comment, prior to the final acceptance of the SEARHC/SCH sale agreement.
Respectfully submitted, on behalf of our children, our children’s children and future generations, until the sun no longer rises and the moon no longer sets.
Sitka NEST is a nonprofit group working to nurture, empower, support and transform birth in Sitka, Alaska.
Sitka NEST,
Leah Murphy, President
Sharon Sullivan, RNC-OB, IBCLC, Vice President
Allicia Witherspoon, Treasurer
Camilla Pfeiffer, Secretary
Iris Nash, Communications Director
Concerned Citizens:
Ariane Martin Goudeau,
Auriella Hughes, RN,
Bernadette Rasmussen,
Beth Compton, Cara Murray,
Chantel Rear, Elizabeth Faulkner,
Gayle Young, Heather Goss
Kathy Ingallinera, RN,
BSN, MSN, FNP-BC,
Lexi Fish Hackett,
Lindy Eliason Hanson,
Mary Todd Andersen,
Molly Killen Blakey, Nicole Filipek,
Nicole Knight, Peg Shea,
Phyllis Hackett, Rachel Jenkins,
Rebecca Peterman, Stacey Vigilante,
Susan Chartier, Tamara Kyle,
Tasha Folsom, Alana Peterson,
Martina Kurzer, Stephanie Yahn,
Kallie McCutcheon, Karen Nordt Christner,
Stacy Evans, Cathy Lieser
