About Us
About Us
Who are we?
Australian Doulas is a group of like-minded doulas who work within a Code of Practice to deliver quality support to women and their families.
Australian Doulas provides doula training specifically tailored to the needs of Western Australian women. Australian Doulas provide ongoing support to their members in the form of mentoring and opportunities for further professional development.
Our History
Australian Doulas was formed in 2004 by Lisa Chalmers.
Before moving to Perth, Lisa was a recognised doula in London and was fortunate enough to train with some of the world’s most renowned obstetric and birthing professionals, including Michel Odent, Sheila Kitzinger and Jean Sutton. Lisa was co-director of Mothers Care Doulas and a founding committee member of Doula UK.
Lisa says, “When I arrived in Perth, I quickly realised that I really missed the network of supportive doulas we had in Doula UK so I strove to create something similar.”
Australian Doulas’ first doula training was held in 2004.
Our Training
Our doula training has evolved over the years to meet the needs of Australian women and is now facilitated by combinations of Tamara Stone, Heather Witts, Emma Fedigan, Dee Waddell and Frances Parkhowell, along with other respected key speakers. We provide training for both birth doulas and postnatal doulas.
In recent years, we have been approached by several community organisations to develop specific training to meet the needs of different areas in the community and to assist with pregnancy and birthing services.
We have had the opportunity of providing doula training to Aboriginal Health Workers in Western Australia and to collaborate with Community Midwifery WA (now The Bump WA) to provide volunteer doulas for refugee and new migrant women. We have also trained bi-cultural doulas to better support these particularly vulnerable women.
Not For Profit
After each doula training course, participants are invited to become members of Australian Doulas and, having agreed to abide by our Code of Practice, Australian Doulas has grown to be the wonderful, supportive network it is today.
In 2010, Australian Doulas officially became a not-for-profit organisation with the aim of being able to reach further into the community and develop projects to meet the needs of Australian women.
Our Vision
Our vision is for all families to be well informed, supported and respected through their pregnancies, birth and the early postnatal period.
Our Mission
Our mission is to:
- model best practice doula conduct;
- provide unbiased information and support to all pregnant women and their families;
- offer the most relevant doula training for Western Australian women;
- offer support to all doulas, regardless of where or when they trained.
Through:
- building strong community relationships;
- ongoing professional development and research;
- raising community awareness of the benefits of continuity of care by a doula;
- supporting one another.
Our Committee
Chairperson –
Vice Chairperson –
Treasurer –
Secretary –
General Board Member –
General Board Member –
General Board Member –
Our Company
Australian Doulas was formed to deliver the best possible birth experience for you and your baby.
It is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using ‘Content here, content here’, making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors
There are many variations of passages of Lorem Ipsum available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don’t look even slightly believable. If you are going to use a passage of Lorem Ipsum, you need to be sure there isn’t anything embarrassing hidden in the middle of text.
Our Team
I am text block. Click edit button to change this text. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo, when an unknown printer took a galley.
