McMaster steps up to take in stranded midwife students from insolvent Laurentian University

McMaster University's midwifery program will grow by 50 per cent in the coming academic year as it welcomes a group of stranded students from the financially plagued Laurentian University.

Nearly three-dozen first- and upper-year students from Laurentian's recently axed bilingual midwifery program - the only one in the country - will make their way to McMaster in September.

The acclaimed program at Laurentian was one of 69 cut in April as the publicly-funded institution grapples with insolvency, court proceedings and historically low enrolment.

Liz Darling, McMaster's assistant dean of midwifery, said about 120 Laurentian students were left astray after the disbandment of the midwifery program, which specialized in northern, Indigenous and rural midwifery care.

Around half of the displaced students will continue their studies at either McMaster or Ryerson University, two schools which, along with Laurentian, have made up the Ontario Midwifery Education consortium since 1993.

We meet regularly with the directors at the three (schools), and as soon as this happened, we said we do would everything we could to try and look after those students if there was no way to save the program," said Darling.

The loss of the midwifery program at Laurentian means there are just two institutions in the province that now offer midwifery degrees.

According to the Association of Ontario Midwives (AOM), graduates from Laurentian's midwifery program represent one-third of the province's incoming midwife registrant cohort. Its closure threatens to leave tens of thousands of Ontario families without midwife care.

The demand for midwifery services in Ontario has pretty much always been greater than the supply of midwifery services," said Darling.

Darling said about one in five people who give birth in Ontario have a midwife, a rate in part buoyed by the pandemic as more women opt for home births instead of in a hospital.

Recent statistics from the AOM show approximately 27 per cent of families who choose midwifery care across the province remain unable to get it.

It's a type of health care that people very much appreciate in value when they receive it, and it's really important we continue to provide educational opportunities for midwife students," said Darling. We definitely need to ensure we continue to have at least as many midwives graduating as we have had up until now."

Sebastian Bron is a Hamilton-based reporter at The Spectator. Reach him via email: sbron@thespec.com