SI Joondalup – Supporting the education of women and girls

Ailsa Rothenbury

By Ailsa Rothenbury

Soroptimist International aims to support the education of women and girls; sometimes the recipients of that support are actually our own members.

I am fortunate to be a member of a very supportive club, Soroptimist International of Joondalup, who acknowledge the private activities I pursue, which relate to my paid work with mothers and babies. At work I am ‘at the coal face’, in a clinic seeing mothers and babies, helping them sort through their day to day challenges and finding pragmatic solutions.

In 2007 after attending the Soroptimist International Conference in Glasgow, I visited the NHS Quality Improvement Board in Edinburgh, to understand more about how they progressed clinical strategies and ‘new knowledge’. Back in my Perth workplace, that information didn’t help, as we don’t have the same setup. I continued to work with the mothers (and fathers) to progress the aims of women who wanted to breastfeed normally, without pain. The strategies work, I wrote a book, and our Soroptimist club’s Publicity Officer managed to get it in the local paper.

Feeding is not part of the standard child developmental screening tools used world wide. Just like a jig saw, I kept finding pieces of the puzzle and fitting them together, until I got the ‘best fit’. Now I am quite confident with this approach to a ‘feeding problem’, where the mum is usually complaining of sore nipples, or the infant is not gaining weight, or seems very uncomfortable during feeds. For the last fifty years the infant has been ‘ignored’, and mothers ‘blamed’ for a range of factors e.g. weak milk, not enough milk, too muck milk, too fat, too thin, too anxious. We must check the efficiency of the infant suck-swallow-breathe cycle.

I developed an assessment tool to evaluate this cycle in infants. My colleagues in community child health refer mums and bubs to my clinic and I teach the parents how to assess the suck and how to recognise when it is wrong and when it is right and oral motor efficiency is achieved. This was the reason for a colleague nominating me for a Nursing Excellence Award recently. I am on the short list. The announcement of winners will be in October, but I will probably be in East Timor on a government invited delegation with Soroptimist International of Joondalup.

Our lives are multifaceted, knowledge doesn’t recognise borders, supporting for others takes many shapes. Knowledge is a valuable resource and we need to put it to good use. I know I have supported and helped many parents here in Perth, and hope that I can make a start in supporting mums (and midwives) in East Timor. This would contribute to the Millenium Development Goals of the UN – particularly goals 4 and 5 concerning child survival and maternal health.