A local midwife is appealing for the return of her car containing medical supplies she uses to attend births after it was stolen from a staff parking lot at Lions Gate Hospital this week.
Vera Berard, one of seven midwives who have hospital privileges at Lions Gate, said she had attended two back-to-back labours and births at the hospital when she came out of the building at 2:30 a.m. Oct. 24 and found her car was gone.
Berard said she’d parked her car in a parking lot reserved for on-call hospital staff near the main entrance. But when she went to drive home “my car wasn’t where I parked it,” she said.
Wondering if she was simply suffering the effects of sleep deprivation and wasn’t remembering where she’d left her car, Berard said she walked all around the hospital before calling security staff to help her look.
Both searches yielded nothing.
That’s when she realized the Toyota Corolla – and the midwifery supplies for home births she had stored in her trunk – were gone.
Berard is quick to point out those supplies don’t contain any drugs. “Midwives do not carry narcotics or painkilling drugs,” she said.
But her kit – packed in a couple of backpack-style cases – did contain equipment used when she’s called out to home births in the middle of the night.
That includes instruments to help deliver babies, equipment to help get babies breathing, and to check on blood pressure and oxygen levels, as well as items to help labouring women, such as a custom-made cushion.
The trunk of her car also contained some new supplies that were to be stored at the hospital for use by all midwives who work out of Lions Gate.
Berard estimates the cost of replacing those supplies at over $6,000. But to most people, she adds, they would be worthless.
“It’s only valuable for the women and the babies we have to take care of,” said Berard. “If people take our stuff we can’t really do our jobs very well.”
Since her car was stolen, Berard said she’s been helped out by midwifery colleagues. “I’m borrowing a home birth kit from a midwife who is off on sick leave,” she said.
Lions Gate has also helped her replace some items and she’s renting a car.
“On a scale of suckiness it’s very annoying and frustrating and inconvenient but it’s not a disaster.”
She’s still hoping her own car – a 2000 burgundy Toyota Corolla – will be found with her equipment in it.
Carrie Stefanson, spokeswoman for Vancouver Coastal Health, said it’s “highly unusual for a vehicle to be stolen from the parking lot.”
Berard was the first midwife to be granted hospital privileges at Lions Gate in 1998 and worked with the province to get midwives legal medical status in B.C.
She said she’s delivered about 900 babies since she started practising on the North Shore, and sees between 40 and 50 pregnant women every year.
