Mother turned away by public hospital - so baby born by road

The hospital had a midwife and obstetrician on duty but it was still preferable for her to give birth by the side of the road, apparently. There's nothing like that "caring" socialist medicine

A WOMAN gave birth on the side of the road after a hospital forced paramedics to put her back in an ambulance and take her to Nepean Hospital owing to a shortage of medical staff. The 35-year-old gave birth to her third baby on the Great Western Highway at Glenbrook about half an hour after being examined by a midwife and obstetrician at Blue Mountains District Anzac Memorial Hospital.

An ambulance spokesman said that when the woman was picked up from her Katoomba home at 5.41am on October 9 her waters had broken and contractions were a minute apart. Maya Drum, network director of women's health and newborn care at Blue Mountains Hospital, yesterday said the woman had phoned to say she was on her way, was 10 days overdue and had been in labour for three hours.

The Herald understands the woman was distressed at being told she could not deliver at the hospital because there was no anaesthetist available and that paramedics had argued against taking her to Nepean because her labour was so advanced. It is also understood that the baby, delivered by a midwife in the back of the ambulance, needed to be ventilated until they reached Nepean Hospital.

Ms Drum said the woman arrived at Blue Mountains at 6.10am and was judged to be "high risk". At that time, the hospital "could not provide anaesthetist cover due to unavoidable staffing shortages and the clinical decision was made to transfer the woman immediately by ambulance to Nepean Hospital, where more comprehensive services were available to provide specialist services to mother and baby", she said in a statement. "During the transfer at 7am, the midwife, assisted by the two ambulance officers, successfully delivered the baby in the ambulance on the side of the Great Western Highway at Glenbrook." She said the mother and baby returned home from Nepean the next day and were well.

There was a public outcry after pregnant women in the Blue Mountains were given just a few days' notice that the birthing unit was closing temporarily on July 21 because of a lack of obstetricians, anaesthetists and midwives. It was reopened on September 1 but had since closed temporarily at least twice because of staff shortages. The State Government has promised before to maintain birthing services in the Blue Mountains but yesterday the Health Minister, John Della Bosca, appeared to back down. "The decision about the continued operation of the service is one for clinicians. The minister will rely on advice from expert staff at NSW Health and the area health service," a spokesman said. The incident highlighted the difficulties in attracting medical staff to some regions.

Meanwhile, expectant mothers in the Bega Valley have also been left in limbo after two of the four Pambula GP obstetricians said they would not deliver babies at Bega Hospital from mid-December. They are angry at the Greater Southern Area Health Service for insisting they travel to Bega after birthing services at Pambula were closed about a month ago because of midwife shortages. A spokeswoman for the area health service said there were no plans to reopen a birthing service at Pambula.

Source








More global cooling

Note that it now well into Spring in Australia

RECORD cold temperatures have brought snow to the Blue Mountains and southern tablelands in NSW and wet and windy weather to the state's coast.

Temperatures dipped to three degrees celsius near Blackheath, west of Sydney, early this morning but wind gusts brought the mercury down further to minus two degrees and pockets of snow fell in Leura and west of Katoomba at Oberon. The Bureau of Metrology (BoM) said snow was also reported in the southern tablelands at Cooma and in Bombala, near the Victorian border.

An unseasonal cold front from the southeast extends to just beyond the ranges and is moving north. Thunderstorms and wind gusts of up to 70km/h have brought rain to the eastern part of the state and abnormally cold conditions to most of NSW. BoM forecaster Jane Golding said average temperatures in the Blue Mountains for October ranged from seven to 18 degrees.

In Sydney today, the temperature is forecast to be 15 degrees, an October temperature which has only been seen twice in the past 14 years, Ms Golding said. Average maximum temperatures for Sydney in October are around 22 degrees.

Source






Another government computer project bites the dust

Back to square one ofter wasting a lot of money. When will governments ever learn that they should buy "off the shelf". There are many commercial database programs available for a comparatively trifling cost

The South Australian government has pulled the plug on its $5 million records management system project, ending a five-year saga plagued by repeated cost blowouts, delays and confusion. The project, commissioned by SA's Department of Families and Communities (DFC) in September 2003, was originally budgeted at $2 million but increased to $4 million after the South Australian Housing Trust (SAHT), which was funding the project, granted a request to double the spend.

However, SAHT froze the project in mid-2007 when the department requested an additional $1 million for the project. Subsequently auditors KPMG was called in to evaluate whether any components of the project could be salvaged, but in May this year the firm recommended the records management system be scrapped altogether and that the department start from scratch.

Details of the project's demise emerged during a government budget and finance committee hearing earlier this week. It remains unclear who is responsible for the failure of the project as there were two groups directly involved in the project - Housing South Australia and the department. Housing SA runs services on behalf of the Housing Trust and had a service agreement with the department. "There were a number of changes (to the project's management)," Housing South Australia corporate services director Dennis Huxley said at the hearing. "At one stage it was in the Housing Trust, then it transferred to DFC, then we changed it back to Housing. "A number of changes occurred over that time. The project has been floundering for some time," Mr Huxley said.

Source





DYSFUNCTIONAL EDUCATION IN AUSTRALIA

Three current articles below

Literacy skills shock for NSW public schools

Only North shore (affluent area) kids do well. Once again "modern" methods fail the poor

One in five children at NSW public schools is at or below minimum literacy levels, with little real improvement despite a large increase in Government spending, a new report has found. And children in country areas generally fare worse than their city cousins, with the gap increasing. "Compared to 10 years ago, the NSW Government has spent over three times more money on improving literacy and numeracy, yet there has been little real improvement," NSW Auditor-General Peter Achterstraat said in his report. "The problem is that children that are at risk are not being adequately identified and are difficult to track through the education system."

The report found that the NSW Department of Education should have a greater focus on the child at risk, not on the school in which he or she is enrolled, and that there needs to be better training for teachers of those children most at risk. "Our children are the most important asset that our society has, and if we don't focus more closely on them now as individuals, then we are failing in our responsibility to the next generation," Mr Achterstraat said. "Just as importantly, we have a responsibility to the community in planning a better future for NSW."

The report found that the percentage of students below the minimum level for literacy was 14 per cent for western NSW, the worst in the state, followed by 12.2 per cent in New England and 11.4 per cent in both the Riverina and on the North Coast. The best area for literacy was northern Sydney's 1.4 per cent, in contrast to 10.8 per cent in the city's south-west.

With numeracy, the percentage of students below the minimum level was 13.5 per cent in western NSW, while the best was 2 per cent in northern Sydney, and 10.8 per cent in the south-west of the city. In broad terms, indigenous students were two to three times worse than other students.

Source






Out of control schools in poor area

Nothing that old-fashioned discipline wouldn't cure.

UP to 22 students a day are suspended from a school in Brisbane's south which can't cope with soaring levels of violent and extreme behaviour. The Queensland Teachers' Union made the shocking claim as 3000 of its members continued rolling strikes to highlight disadvantage at 54 Logan-Albert-Beaudesert schools. [A lower socio-economic area]

The union said inadequate funding contributed to escalating violence at schools in the region where students regularly assaulted or threatened staff and their peers. Smoking, drugs, truancy, abusive language and unsafe behaviours like tackling were other common triggers for suspension. The Courier-Mail recently reported suspensions were up 25 per cent at Gold Coast and Ipswich schools, which includes those in Logan and Beaudesert, since 2005-06.

"A Logan high school has had up to 22 suspensions a day," former Logan teacher and QTU organiser Penny Spalding said. "For some of those schools it's not uncommon, so (an administrator's and teacher's) workload is tremendous. "It's getting worse and I think society understands teenage behaviour is getting more challenging."

QTU president Steve Ryan said this week's strikes, which end today, were aimed at drawing an additional $40 million from the Government in a "needs-based" approach to unique problems facing Logan-Albert and Beaudesert schools.

Education Queensland said yesterday it could not confirm nor deny that a Logan school handed out 22 suspensions a day because it had no school-by-school data. A spokeswoman for Education Minister Rod Welford said he recognised the challenges of schools in low socio-economic areas. She said the department had invested $1.7 million to tackle truancy and improve outcomes at large state schools in economically disadvantaged areas.

It is common practice to put suspended students into out-of-school Positive Learning Centres, where trained behavioural teachers implement behaviour modification programs. However, when a student's behaviour disrupts the class but does not warrant suspension they are often sent to what Education Queensland has dubbed Responsible Thinking Classrooms. "Schools are having to beg, borrow and steal to run them," Ms Spalding said. "They are the lifeline of some of these Logan schools."

The union claimed the region's schools needed more behaviour management resources and staff, particularly for Prep to Year 3 and Year 8 classes. A Queensland Teachers' Union spokeswoman said the parents of some Logan/Beaudesert region students spoke little English and were not involved enough in their child's education, both traits associated with low socio-economic areas.

Source






Leftist bigotry in schools

At one of Sydney's best private girls schools, Year 8 geography students opened their term three materials on changing global relationships to read the following definition: "Globalisation is what happens when you lose your job in Brunswick, Bankstown or Elizabeth because the company for which you work has been bought out by the Australian subsidiary of a Dallas-based transnational company that has decided to relocate its production of T-shirts to Mexico because of cheaper wage costs and lower health and safety standards."

Assuming it was a scholarly attempt to provoke robust debate, I searched the students' materials for the other side to the globalisation and free-trade story. Alas, there wasn't one. No facts explaining how globalisation and trade have lifted millions of people out of poverty, improving living standards, mortality rates, education, training and the like.

The geography teacher who stands in front of his teenage students is surely entitled to his view that globalisation is an evil force. He is not, however, entitled to use his position to indoctrinate his young charges. And that is why, as his students edge towards their final school years, facing assessments and exams that will determine their future, they should have a copy of Mark Lopez's The Little Black Schoolbook tucked away in their schoolbags. Launched last week in Melbourne, Lopez's book is aimed at exposing the bias within the classroom so that students can turn it to their advantage rather than bombing in exams by courageously trying to tackle the received political wisdom in schools and universities.

Expect howls of derision from critics who deny that teachers express and impose political orthodoxy in the classroom. But Lopez, a high school tutor, has seen many of his students submit brilliant work only to receive mediocre marks because an essay did not accord with their teacher's views on a subject. Just as I, and many parents, have watched in disbelief when students have crafted thoughtful opposition to orthodoxies such as Al Gore's position on climate change, only to be marked down for no other reason than the teacher's personal views.

Just as we have read about it in this newspaper, where educators such as Kevin Donnelly have exposed education bureaucrats politicising school curriculums by requiring a "critical-postmodernist pedagogy".

Refreshingly, Lopez's book is not a whinge about the classroom being infected with Marxist, feminist and postmodern perspectives. Instead it offers up constructive lessons for students to beat the bias in the system. That means more than learning conventional study skills. It means being street-smart enough to recognise the limitations of some teachers. And it means knowing that some teachers will ask for a well-argued essay but reward essays that reflect their own biases.

One of his Year 12 students was asked to do a research essay on Lenin's New Economic Policy. His first draft was a well-researched, well-argued essay that received a C. Lopez told his student to go back to his notes, work out his teacher's understanding of the topic and then redraft the essay to omit everything that differed from his teacher's opinions. The teacher awarded the redraft an A grade.

In many respects, Lopez's book is a depressing read. We should not need a book that advises students that "your campaign for straight As must begin by establishing a psychological profile of your examiner. Make your teacher's bias your friend, because if you do not it will be a formidable enemy."

We should not need a book that explains the continuing effect of the 1960s counter-culture on teaching and school curriculums. Or a book that draws on real-life experiences within the education system to help students identify how political ideology affects the examination and assessment, how to hunt for clues from prescribed reading materials and decipher questions to work out what answer would align with a teacher's views.

Or a book that helps students identify the politically correct answers: if you are asked to take a side in the "women in combat" debate, argue in favour, using feminist grounds of equal opportunity. "In a dispute between animal rights groups and duck hunters, if you side with the hunters you are a dead duck," he writes.

But students do need precisely such a book. Better to be aware of the realities and learn to play the game. Those who have used Lopez's advice have used it wisely. "Rather than being buffeted by fate, these students took responsibility for their education and succeeded," he writes.

Neither should we need a Senate hearing into academic freedom. But, again, reality trumps hope. In his submission to the inquiry a few weeks ago, historian Keith Windschuttle revealed why he is detested by his academic opponents. There is no emotion, no hyperbole from Windschuttle. Just a devastating list of facts, quoting academics to prove the politicisation of scholarship and skewering any pretence of objectivity. He cites Australian historian Henry Reynolds, who admits that his first major work, The Other Side of the Frontier, "was not conceived, researched or written in a mood of detached scholarship". And this from Reynolds: "History should not only be relevant but politically utilitarian."

Windschuttle exposes feminist historian Marilyn Lake for admitting "the writing of history is a political activity". He reveals how the search for truth was abandoned by academics who treat the alleged genocidal activities in Australia as equivalent to the Nazi Holocaust. Name after name, extract after extract, the bias of history teaching by prominent Australian academics is laid bare.

The inquiry is a Stalinist exercise, say critics. Wrong. Windschuttle is no fan of government intervention. He told The Australian that it is a fundamental tenet of Western civilisation that institutions must remain independent of the state. The purpose of the inquiry, like Lopez's book, is to expose political orthodoxy in the education system. Sunlight, after all, can be a powerful disinfectant.

We should name and shame academics who breach their scholarly duty to objectivity. And university vice-chancellors with spine should do more to promote intellectual diversity rather than caving in to the rigid orthodoxy of political academics.

That said, overzealousness won't help the cause of exposing classroom indoctrination. Nitpicking over trivial episodes won't either. It will only serve to undermine the genuine cases of blatant political bias that should be exposed.

In an ideal world, the classroom and lecture theatre would not be used as tools of indoctrination. In the real world, it happens too often. Students may as well know about it, understand why it exists and learn how to play the game to win. If that process improves the education system by reminding educators that they, too, are being assessed for their intellectual rigour or lack of it, so much the better.

Source