Alison Pearson stood on the side of the road, cut off by floodwaters, scared she was losing her baby.
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Ms Pearson, from Cobar in western NSW, was on a 320km round trip to Bourke Hospital for an ultrasound after she experienced signs she might be miscarrying.
The technician at Bourke told her the scan was inconclusive.
Unsure of her baby's fate, the journey home was long, compounded by flooded roads and detours.
A fortnight later, she drove five hours to Orange hospital, for a scan that showed her baby had survived.
Throughout her pregnancy, Ms Pearson took time off work to travel hundreds of kilometres to Dubbo and Orange for check-ups, scans and tests that are not available in or near the mining town of Cobar, located 700km inland from Sydney.
"You shouldn't have to go through that many hoops to do the most natural thing in the world," Ms Pearson tells AAP.
Stories like Ms Pearson's are becoming more common across regional and rural Australia.
Country hospitals are limiting or closing their maternity services due to staff shortages, forcing pregnant women to travel long distances to hospitals in major centres.
Some nurses say the shortages are the worst they've ever been, in part due to demanding workloads, stress, and burn-out during the pandemic. The issue has spilled into industrial action across NSW, with health workers participating in strikes over pay and staffing ratios.
Ms Pearson is full of praise for the healthcare workers in Cobar, who she says work hard with limited resources. She says she doesn't expect a full birthing service to operate in the outback.
"It's the supplementary care that's needed," she tells AAP.
"When you centralise something, how much worse is it going to get? Centralised is three hours away from us.
"It's not the people that are broken. It's the system."
In rural areas south of Cobar, pregnant women travel hundreds of kilometres to Griffith Base Hospital.
But families may not find adequate care in Griffith, where there are long-standing vacancies and difficulties attracting and retaining midwives, local state MP Helen Dalton says.
Ms Dalton says women are sometimes encouraged to go to Wagga Wagga, a further two hours away.
"Babies don't wait. I know plenty of people that have had babies on the side of the road," Ms Dalton says.
In south-west Victoria this week, Jessa Laws gave birth to her daughter on a roadside at Port Fairy while travelling to Warrnambool Hospital, more than an hour from her home in Portland.
She was scheduled to give birth at the bigger hospital in Warrnambool, with a back-up plan for Portland hospital if her labour progressed quickly. But Portland District Health announced a three-month shutdown of its birthing suite in March due to staffing problems.
Local MP, Roma Britnell, told state parliament Ms Laws had earlier contacted her, expressing fears about travelling to Warrnambool while in labour.
"She had her worst fears realised," Ms Britnell said on Wednesday.
Health Minister Martin Foley said the hospital's management put safety first by pausing its service.
"The inescapable truth is that there is a nationwide shortage ... of midwives in our community, in our state and in our nation," Mr Foley said.
Unions say there are particular difficulties recruiting midwives in Victoria, the Northern Territory, NSW and the ACT.
Federal health department data shows that while the midwifery workforce is growing incrementally, most midwives are part-time.
Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation Victorian Branch Secretary Lisa Fitzpatrick says working conditions need to improve for midwives to work full-time.
She says midwives are "bone-weary" after supporting women and new mothers isolated from their families during the pandemic, all while colleagues were in and out of furlough.
In NSW, Ms Dalton says the staffing gaps stem from a lack of housing in regional areas, poor pay, low morale, and fear of being held responsible for fatal errors in understaffed wards.
"They hold their breath before they start their shift, hoping to God their team will turn up and that it will be a quiet night," she says.
"They're exhausted, and they're tired, and they're leaving because they cannot put up with the stress and strain.
"People are really concerned about the lack of services. All the government seems to do is centralise."
NSW Regional Health Minister Bronnie Taylor visited Griffith hospital this week to turn the first sod on a $250 million redevelopment that includes maternity and paediatric services.
The government says the project will stop people needing to travel out of the region for specialist care.
For Ms Pearson, her story ended happily - her son Hunter is now 17 months old.
Just five weeks after he was born, she described her experience in a moving submission to the NSW rural health inquiry, saying the value of lives should not be determined by geography.
"I got Hunter out of it. He's healthy and he's well," she says.
"What if that wasn't the case? How tragic would that be for a family?"
Australian Associated Press
