Thank you so much for your question.
I think that midwives have really stepped up in the time of COVID-19 to sustain their services and to offer new services, including advocacy for people who are birthing to receive respectful care and the support they need.
To give you an example, at times in the pandemic there were birthing people who were denied the presence of a support person in labour, and midwives advocated to ensure that the birthing people could have the appropriate support, which we know the evidence supports in showing reduced rates of Cesarean birth and other interventions.
In my place of work, people can bring in their partner or they can bring in a certified doula. We are masked, although the birthers aren't necessarily wearing masks when they're pushing. They're not able to bring in their families to visit them afterwards anymore, and extended families are no longer able to be present for the births. There have been, in certain jurisdictions, restrictions on home births that were made very hastily, and I'm very pleased to say that the midwifery leadership advocated strongly for home birth to be reinstated. As I believe Ms. Tecson alluded to earlier, one of the strengths of midwifery during this pandemic has been that we offer care out of hospital which relieves the pressure on acute care settings, as well as keeping healthy people away from sick people in acute-care settings.
Midwives have also expanded their offerings to include COVID testing and COVID immunizations, and to provide care for those who found themselves unattached to their primary care provider, because, at the beginning of the pandemic, many family physicians closed their practices. Midwives didn't have that luxury of waiting to figure things out. We hit the road and ensured that people continued to receive the care they required.