She is also facing a fourth charge of failing to keep detailed clinical records during that period.<\/p>\n
The hearing began in Auckland this morning and the midwife, who has interim name suppression, appeared via audio-visual link.<\/p>\n
She was an hour late to proceedings and declined to switch on her camera.<\/p>\n
The Midwifery Council of New Zealand\u2019s first witness was Murray, who explained that midwives claimed pay from the Ministry of Health and could also claim for rural support and secondary midwife services.<\/p>\n
Murray said the investigation showed \u201cmany\u201d of the women whom the midwife claimed to have served rurally actually lived in the city.<\/p>\n
When the audit began in 2019, Murray said the midwife was asked to provide documentation on the 137 women she had made claims on.<\/p>\n
The midwife told the auditors there would be \u201cgaps\u201d in her documentation because some of her notes were \u201cdestroyed\u201d in a Waikato flood in 2017, Murray said.<\/p>\n
The claims where documentation was lost in a flood were ultimately excluded from the investigation, Murray said.<\/p>\n
She also said the midwife had named 16 midwives she had worked with, or covered for, in her claims, seven of whom responded to the investigation.<\/p>\n
Those midwives highlighted several inconsistencies in the woman\u2019s claims, including that the midwife was not recorded as present for many of the births, rural services or ambulance transfers that she claimed.<\/p>\n
In some instances the midwife was not even in the country when she claimed to have delivered these services, Murray said.<\/p>\n
At multiple points during the investigation the midwife did not respond to requests for further information and ultimately said she didn\u2019t want to comment, Murray said.<\/p>\n
\u2018I do not know why that claim was made\u2019<\/p>\n
Another witness was midwife Cherie Coe, who was named as the lead maternity carer in 14 of the midwife\u2019s claims.<\/p>\n
She explained that she had worked at a practice in Waikato that employed locum or relief midwives to cover when staff were sick or on annual leave.<\/p>\n
The midwife was one of those locum workers.<\/p>\n
Coe went over her notes relating to the midwife\u2019s claims and repeatedly said there was no reason for the midwife to claim for rural support or secondary midwife services.<\/p>\n
\u201cI do not know why that claim was made,\u201d Coe said of the relevant claims.<\/p>\n
For an induced birth in September 2018 in Waikato Hospital, there was no documentation that the midwife was there, and for another woman, the midwife gave a consultation to the mother but was not present at the birth as she claimed, Coe said.<\/p>\n
Coe, or other supporting midwives, GPs or doctors delivered the babies, she said.<\/p>\n
The midwife\u2019s lawyer, Neil Shaw, said his client wouldn\u2019t get paid as a locum unless she made these claims.<\/p>\n
Coe responded that the midwife would be paid for covering her and her colleagues\u2019 workload.<\/p>\n
\u201cShe didn\u2019t need to be making those claims as a locum covering our caseload,\u201d she explained.<\/p>\n
Shaw countered that his client wouldn\u2019t be paid for being present during ambulance transfers and other extra services, for example.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, but she didn\u2019t do a transfer, so … \u201d Coe replied.<\/p>\n
\u201cWell, she would disagree,\u201d Shaw countered.<\/p>\n
\u201cOkay,\u201d Coe said.<\/p>\n
Finally, the tribunal heard from midwife Anna Young, who also said the accused covered for her and her colleagues as a locum midwife in the Waikato.<\/p>\n
She similarly could not find a reason why the midwife had made claims for a number of services when the woman often wasn\u2019t there, or it was Young or others who delivered the babies.<\/p>\n
The numbers<\/p>\n
The first charge the midwife faces is of not registering the mothers she claims to have serviced between 2017 and 2019.<\/p>\n
She was not paid out for these claims.<\/p>\n
However, she claimed and was paid thousands for maternity care that she did not provide, the Midwifery Council of New Zealand says in its charging document.<\/p>\n
This includes receiving $28,724.70 for 28 claims or 18 pregnancies and $101,963.89 for rural support care in 173 claims or 151 pregnancies.<\/p>\n
She also claimed $8442.73 from the Ministry of Health for rural travel following birth, whereas the charges say she had \u201cno basis for doing so\u201d.<\/p>\n
The final sum alleged to have been falsely claimed and which Murray said Health NZ is seeking a repayment for is $166,085.<\/p>\n
The tribunal hearing continues this week.<\/p>\n
Ella Scott-Fleming has been a journalist for three years and previously worked at the Otago Daily Times, Gore Ensign and Metro Magazine. She has an interest in court and general reporting. She\u2019s currently based in Auckland covering justice related stories.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"She is also facing a fourth charge of failing to keep detailed clinical records during that period. The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":500827,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[250128,250127,1117,39107,1558,2252,536,10712,104285,738,78,2243,100600,130,13631,111,43,139,69,1118,91131,3109,131,1524],"class_list":["post-500826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-250128","tag-166k","tag-accused","tag-attended","tag-been","tag-births","tag-care","tag-claiming","tag-falsely","tag-funding","tag-in","tag-maternity","tag-midwife","tag-more","tag-never","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-of","tag-provided","tag-public","tag-than","tag-waikato"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=500826"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/500826\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/500827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=500826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=500826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=500826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}