Celia Hammond (Curtin, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I offer a hand of friendship to my colleague the member for Perth—he always does give me a smile to my face! I want to speak about something really important today. It's the fact that all women and babies deserve to have the highest standard of care and best treatment during childbirth. VitalTrace is a medical device start-up company in Curtin that is developing an innovative solution to the global problem of safely monitoring babies during childbirth.

It was a pleasure to recently visit the headquarters of VitalTrace, a recent recipient of a federal government Cooperative Research Centres project round, to meet the team and learn more about the company. Current techniques for monitoring babies for poor oxygen, also known as hypoxia, during childbirth are based on outdated technology from the 1960s, which sometimes results in inadequate or inaccurate data. This can lead to serious complications, such as brain or other organ damage, and unnecessary intervention with emergency caesarean sections, all of which can have lifelong consequences for the mother and the child. VitalTrace has brought together a multidisciplinary team of specialist engineers and product developers, clinicians and researchers to develop a medical device that continuously measures a highly accurate marker of fetal hypoxia. This is a potential game changer for women's and children's health, and I'm looking forward to visiting them again to see their further developments.