Care of the Children and Obstetrics

This happened to be the last day of the week... before the Midsummer Holiday. We went to a Children's Day Care Center and then we came back to the University Hospital to see the work of Finnish midwives, in the Obstetrics Department. We also see some newborns with their mothers.

In this case, the services seemed to similar to the corresponding ones in my country, but I could find very imortant differences to be ignored. Of course there were differences regarding the quality and quantity of available resources, but this was not the most important aspect to consider, in my opinion. The most interesting were located outside the health system: the social security as a whole, including the educational system for the children and the working conditions and warranties for the parents were very different. For example, mothers in Finland usually have a period of 18 months! (Even though I do not remember the exact figures, but it is more than in my country where mothers must

come back to work when their babies are only 3 months old!) Bonding is a very important process, whose interference can produce several kinds of undesirable consequences. Also, the social protection system provides a wide range of different option for the parents to decide the best kind of preschool education for their children. Everyone has access to the same options, without regard to the income level of the family.

Also, we can see this phenomenon from another point of view: people who provide this services to the children are also adults and they have their own children. In Finland the difference in net income are one of the lowest in the world (as shown by the GINI index). Teachers and health care personnel have fair salaries, dignity and social recognition. The working conditions are also very good (Pre-school teachers were in charge of small groups of students in charge per person, the opposite being the rule in my country). As any other worker, they have the same benefits in health, aducation, etc. I think that all this things together explain the good quality of the services delivered.

As a final anecdote: We and my classmates were waking through the mother's delivery place and neonatal wards, when we see a very beautiful young lady, with a smile in her face, feeding a newborn, very peaceful, with no hurry at all. We thought she was the child's mother, but actually she did not! She was a nurse doing her usual job in the Hospital. Then I begun to think about what would you need in order to have that working conditions, and again, the solution is not confined to change things only inside the health system: you should think about the health system as composed by people who, in turn, are members of the society and everything has an impact in everything.