Vital hometown maternity help saved me and my babies: Riverina mum

"Without the help and guidance and the constant care of the doctors and nurses [at Cootamundra], I probably would not be here today ... and my children wouldn't be here either," Cootamundra mother of two, Belinda Thompson said.

The NSW Parliamentary Inquiry into Birth Trauma has unveiled the painful experiences of many women during their pregnancies.

But for the women in a town like Cootamundra, their focus is on keeping and strengthening their local maternity services.

It is important to them to be able to birth locally where possible and potentially avoid complications from travelling more than 40 minutes away from home to deliver their babies at Temora, Young or Wagga hospitals.

"We have had a few scary cases here where people have lost a baby or a baby was alive here and then transported elsewhere and they had lost it on transport or on arrival at the other hospitals," said Ms Thompson, who travelled to Canberra for both of her births.

Ms Thompson's children were both born prematurely, her son arriving after just 28 weeks (seven months) and her daughter at 32 weeks (eight months).

Despite leaving the region to give birth, she couldn't express enough the importance of the Cootamundra maternity services in her prenatal and postnatal care.

"You have that familiar face, you have that person that you can confide in, you have the confidence in that team that will ensure [the care of] yourself and your baby," Ms Thompson said.

"It's also important for your recovery ... to have those familiar faces around you, for your mental health as well.

"Because of my circumstances, I had to be transported out of here, to be away from family and friends. It was a very trying time for my mental health.

"On my return from my hospital in Canberra ... it was just really reassuring to come back to my local town and have the monitoring that my children needed and to check in on me as well, to make sure that I was going okay, considering the trauma the early births had caused."

Ms Thompson said Cootamundra Hospital needs to keep what it currently has and improve it.

Retired midwife Anne Lawson, who worked for 40 years with Cootamundra Health Service, has seen her fair share of traumatic births and strongly believes small communities need maternity services, and the other health services that go with it.

"We had women making it to the car park," she said.

"How can they make it to Wagga, Temora, Young or anywhere else?

"They haven't got time some women, so it is dangerous for starters, and we have to have maternity, we have to have pathology to go with maternity, and we have to have theatre, because if that woman has a bleed, we need the pathology, we need theatre.

"So they're three very important things we have to even upgrade from what they are now."

Cootamundra MP, Steph Cooke, echoed a similar sentiment to that of Ms Thompson, Ms Lawson and parts of the 43 recommendations adopted by the Select Committee on Birth Trauma.

"The need for continuity of care for mothers," said Ms Cooke.

"Whether they're having their first child or subsequent children, they need to have that certainty that the clinicians, the midwives, the team of people that are helping them at this very, very vulnerable time, are going to be with them on that journey from start to finish.

"If people in Cootamundra are able to have their baby locally, that's indeed what they should be able to do, so they understand right from the outset, who their GP is, who their midwives are and they can be on that journey together, rather than having fragmented care."

Ms Cooke said if transport to another facility was in the best interests a mother and her baby, then that should be taken into consideration, but she would like to see Cootamundra services strengthened.

"So as many mothers as possible can have adequate, top level care here in their own community to maintain that continuity of care," she said.

"And as a result they will get their family and their newborns off to the best possible start."