I am a midwife in a NSW hospital. This is what an ordinary day looks like | Oceane Campbell

It’s the start of my shift as a midwife in a New South Wales hospital. I feel like I am doing a lot for my $45 per hour. I am caring for a woman in the throes of labour. Her eyes are glassy, her vocalisations frantic. She is in transition, a time in labour you can feel terrified and out of control. I hold her and ground her with my well-practised voice, refined from more than 10 years of experience.

I set up a baby Resuscitaire in case it is needed. I document heart rates and clean up body fluids while also educating a student working with me. We write down vital signs and draw up drugs ready to administer. Do you know that midwives can initiate dosages of morphine, antibiotics and other drugs without having to bother a doctor?

My $45 per hour also means that I get to see a life emerge. I get to see the dark hair of this new person before anyone else. I get to gasp. Crow. Delight. Whoop. Blink back tears as I hold a new life. I pass her to the mother, my second midwife passes me a warm towel to rub this baby into life. It’s your birthday! Take your first breath little one.

But suddenly, things aren’t running as smoothly. There is more blood than I’d like to see. But that’s OK. If this was someone you loved, I’d know how to keep them safe.

For $45 per hour, I can put a cannula in so we can give life-saving medications. I can hang fluids, I can birth the placenta and I can reassure the woman as to what I need to do to stop the bleeding. Luckily I am not alone in this. I’ve pressed the buzzer, called for my midwifery and medical colleagues to come help. But for those critical first minutes, it is me, a woman in a highly gendered profession, underpaid and undervalued. Will there be enough colleagues available to answer my buzzer if the NSW government continues to make nurses and midwives the lowest paid of our profession in the country? Do you worry about the impact this will have on mothers and their babies?

I do a lot for $45 per hour, and I don’t feel the NSW government appreciates that. I worry that it has an old-fashioned view of our profession – or maybe of women and their needs. Do you know midwives and nurses have a highly pressured, clinically skilled role? We assess, triage, cannulate, suture, medicate and resuscitate, and all while providing the soothing, reassuring care that many of us were drawn to the profession to do.

And what about at 4am? I am now paid $51 – that extra 15% is meant to compensate for the physical health consequences and psychological impact of compulsory night shifts. I don’t get to nap or relax. We have less staff on at night. For my extra $6 per hour, I am one of the most senior midwives managing a heart-stopping (for me – breath-stopping for the baby) shoulder dystocia in the middle of the night. It takes a long time for the doctors to arrive to my emergency buzzer, but luckily I have the skills to internally rotate the baby’s shoulders that were stuck like cement for five long minutes. The smell of my cold sweat stays with me all night. It stinks of the fear and panic I feel, wondering if I’ll ever free this baby, if the resuscitation we do together after would be enough. It stinks of my exhaustion from being awake with my own kids all day, before having to work all night. Fifteen percent isn’t enough. Male-dominant industries compensate their night-shift workers with not just a better increase in pay but extra benefits and compensation, so why not us?

If you saw me give the first breaths to your grey lifeless baby, bringing forth that yearned-for sound of a cry, would you pay more attention to what we are asking for? Fairer pay and better conditions. We are not interested in claims from the state government that it is offering “more” than previous governments. Don’t tell us you can’t afford to. Prioritise us. Value us.

I am ashamed to admit that I worked on the last strike day. But as a single mother of three, I desperately needed the overtime money of a double shift. It meant I was on shift from 7am till 10pm. I don’t think the women who came in to have a baby deserved a tired midwife. As the NSW Nurses and Midwives’ Association (NSWNMA) argues, midwives are on 2007 wages paying 2025 prices, and with clinical skills and the responsibilities that are vastly different to what they were when these wages were first negotiated.

I am asking the NSW government to have empathy and compassion but also common sense. Supporting women to have safe and healthy pregnancies, births and postnatal experiences has got to be a core priority. Maybe the old adage of “you can judge a society by how it treats its most vulnerable” could guide you. Birthing women are strong, courageous and incredible. But they are vulnerable too. And they deserve appropriately paid midwives with safe ratios and work conditions.

• Oceane Campbell is a midwife and author living in NSW. Her second novel, A Labour of Love: A Midwife’s Stories of Birth, Life and Speaking Up for Women will be published in April 2025 by Hardie Grant