Dr. Mary McCaffrey:

The proposed legislation does provide clarity for us and it is extremely well-crafted. With regard to the question as to whether someone will get the care they need, the life of the mother is always going to be paramount. Emergencies are always dealt with as such. As Dr. Burke, said earlier, when an emergency presents in any hospital, everyone from anaesthetists, cardiologists and whoever, rolls up their sleeves.

With regard to personal views, my personal practice would be if I ever felt my view was slightly personal and not based on evidence-based practice, one would sit down and discuss it with other colleagues. If necessary, one would ring someone in a specialty or sub-specialty related to the matter. The way medicine is practised these days, people do not tend to practise in isolation but as part of teams. Most hospitals also have governance groups as well.

With regard to Senator Mullen’s question on whether this legislation will make a dramatic difference to our practice, I do not believe it will. I believe we will continue to practise obstetrics as we do. I do not believe we will see a dramatic increase in requests for assessments for suicide. I hope not anyway. Senator Mullen needs to ask the psychiatrists about the subjectivity of it but that is the reason there would be more than one psychiatrist on an assessment team. As an obstetrician I do not feel I have enough knowledge of psychiatry to have an input into the diagnosis but to be there to support the team of psychiatry staff in terms of planning where the pregnancy would go from there.

With regard to training, it is not so much training as the need for guidelines. For people who have not been involved in providing termination of pregnancy services - even to decide whether it will be surgical or medical - we will need guidelines. Hopefully, it will be something that will be a very rare event.