Carnarvon Health Campus—Maternity services 21. Mr Shane Love to the Premier: It has now been four years and two Ministers for Health since maternity services were cut from Carnarvon Health Campus, for

AnsweredQoN 21Legislative Assembly
Asked
18 February 2026
Portfolio
Premier

QuestionView source ↗

Carnarvon Health Campus—Maternity services
21. Mr Shane Love to
the Premier:
It has now been four
years and two Ministers for Health since maternity services were cut from
Carnarvon Health Campus, forcing mothers to travel hundreds of kilometres away
from their home and their support network and costing over $2 million.
(1) Why has this government failed to restore maternity
services in Carnarvon after more than 1,300 days of what was promised to be a
temporary closure?
(2) Will the Premier step up where his ministers
have failed and provide maternity services in Carnarvon in 2026?

AnswerView source ↗

(1)–(2) I thank the member for the
question. He could have inserted the words "Katanning" and
"shadow Minister for Health, Hon Roger Cook" into that question and
he would have reflected the very same thing that I asked previously when I was
the shadow minister. The fact of the matter is that unless we have a general
practitioner–gynaecologist or a general practitioner–obstetrician,
we will not be able to create a safe environment for the delivery of maternity
services. In addition, member, a certain number of deliveries are required for
the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Australia to be convinced that the necessary
critical mass of activity is there for those nurses and midwives to be able to
practice safely. It is a sad reflection on the world in which we live that the
good old days—the days when my dad caught me as I was coming out at
Cottesloe Hospital in 1965—no longer exist because clinical safety is uppermost
in our considerations. We would love to have maternity services back at
Carnarvon hospital and we have not lost sight of that vision, but we have to
work within the constraints. We need to have the personnel, the volume and the
clinical safety to be confident that we can bring it back, but we would love to
one day.

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