Students in Focus
The UC midwifery student looking to keep her workforce alive and well
As midwives hit "a real crisis point", as University of ÃØÃÜÖ±²¥ honours student Alix Dornbusch puts it, she is determined to find out just how to keep her colleagues in the life-saving industry she herself only recently joined.
Alix is a self-professed lifelong learner, and it was during the long months of lockdowns, and pandemic-fueled reflection in 2020, that she felt an all-too-familiar itch to take the plunge back into studying.
That desire led her to enroll at UC.
“I needed to do something a little bit more for myself, and I always wanted to study midwifery. I had a few friends complete the qualification, and thought I’d just throw my hat in the ring,” says Alix.
That decision to apply for a Bachelor of Midwifery quickly pivoted her life into a new direction, one of purpose and determination.
“I have loved it from day one,” she says. “I have loved every aspect of it, the workplace placements, the learning – it’s exactly what I was meant to do. The only drawback is that I didn’t find it in my 20s.”
Despite having completed her bachelor’s degree last year, and having since entered the workforce at The ÃØÃÜÖ±²¥ Hospital, Alix knew she still had more learning left in her tank.
She’s now planning to dive deeper into understanding not only how her colleagues are perceived in the workplace, but also how they view themselves and their place in the health system.
Her study is looking to unravel not only how her colleagues have landed at the bedside of those giving birth, giving their support to mothers and newborns, but also if the different paths that led them there have shaped their experiences entering the field.
"In midwifery studies, it’s a little bit unique in that there are a greater number of mature age students who have had their own children prior. There are school leavers that go straight into midwifery, but they're definitely in the minority,” says Alix.
“We’ve had a lot of people that have studied midwifery in the past, as I have, and then there are also people within the midwifery workforce that are dual registered. For instance, they’ve done nursing first and then entered midwifery through postgrad avenues.”
Student placements have opened Alix’s eyes to just how different life journeys have led midwives to the same halls and shaped their experiences – especially for those who have worked in the medical field before.
“They just seemed much more at home in the whole environment, with the handovers, the hospital environment, the collaboration between different professions like doctors and physios, and just being able to do things like understand the organisation’s acronyms,” Alix says.
“Coming into the workforce with those skills and that knowledge, they don’t have to consolidate those skills earlier on.I sometimes wonder if that might make it a little bit easier for them to transition into the workforce.”
As a student, poor workplace culture was something Alix often heard about from her peers – but thankfully something she never experienced herself.
Those stories of hardship spurred her on to investigate why experiences between individuals were so different.
To find out, Alix will soon be launching an anonymous online survey, combining the Australian Midwifery Workplace Culture Survey and multiple choice demographic questions.
She’s hoping to uncover both how to create and support a positive workplace culture, and how to identify those who could be at risk of leaving the workplace.
“I’m really trying to make sure that we can identify those groups at risk of burnout early on, perhaps even when they’re students and allow better support going into the workforce,” says Alix.
“As well as working out the reasons that those midwives are leaving, before they go.”
The work is critical, because while the pandemic may have brought Alix into the industry, it has also been the reason many midwives reached breaking point and chose to walk away from the profession altogether.
“We know that after the COVID-19 pandemic, we had a huge amount of burnout among all health professionals, particularly within midwifery, and the numbers coming through now aren’t high enough to sustain the workforce. So, we're actually at a real crisis point in midwifery, where it’s looking like we’re going to run out of midwives.”
Words by Georgie Burgess, photos by Tyler Cherry.