Carli Beange awarded Australian Midwife of the Year for her role in changing WA’s maternity care landscape

Carli Beange has been crowned Australia’s best midwife.

But plenty of families in the southern suburbs have known this for a long time.

“There’s a family in Kelmscott where I’ve delivered all five of the siblings in that family,” Ms Beange told The West after receiving the prestigious award during the Australian College of Midwives’ National Conference.

“And it’s just fantastic that Armadale and Bentley have facilitated that continuity across the lifetime for that woman rather than just in one pregnancy.”

That continuity is a passion for Ms Beange, who heads the Midwifery Birthing Centre at Bentley Health Service.

She received the Australian Midwife of the Year 2025 honour for her ground-breaking efforts to set up the State’s first midwife-led maternity service.

The Australian College of Midwives recognised Ms Beange for exceptional leadership skills and her “transformative role” in WA’s maternity care landscape, by helping set up the Midwifery Birthing Centre.

In a first for public hospitals in WA, the centre, opened in 2024, is the State’s first fully endorsed midwife-led maternity service.

It allows mums-to-be to have the same midwife through their whole journey, often leading to better outcomes for women and their babies.

“This award is an absolute honour and a privilege, because this honour came from my peers in midwifery, so it’s incredibly special to me and I was up against other excellent finalists,” she said.

Ms Beange has been a midwife for 20 years but said being present at a birth still makes her smile every day.

“I’m grateful to be given the opportunity to set up the midwifery birth centre because I really feel like that moves midwifery forward and it cements our place as the primary carers for women in their birthing journeys from conception to eight weeks postpartum,” she said.