Midwife

MSF provides services for mothers and newborns in Lesotho, where a high prevalence of HIV and limited access to care can make giving birth dangerous.

MSF is providing care to mothers in the remote Ethiopian region of Aroressa, where health centers and qualified medical personnel are scarce.

Belgian midwife Cathy Janssens, who recently returned from a MSF assignment in Syria, reflects on the highs and lows of her experience.

This special report details MSF’s approach to delivering quality emergency obstetric care to prevent maternal death.

"The biggest problem is that the baby is at critical risk due to the mother’s dehydration—the baby will not receive enough oxygen, blood flow, or the necessary nutrients, which causes distress."

Liza Ramlow, a 62-year-old midwife from Massachusetts, has been working in Nigeria since this past May in some of the most deprived slums in Lagos.

An MSF midwife describes the nature and the challenges of a normal day's work in Pakistan's Balochistan province.

MSF's two facilities in Imey in the Somali region of Ehtiopia provides crucial health care services to people who would otherwise go without.

MSF midwife Mali Ebrahami described her experience working in Wardher, where health care and other basic services are minimal.

Since I started with MSF, women’s reproductive health programs have grown in priority. This makes sense in light of high maternal mortality rates in the contexts where MSF works. With much more information and evidence available, I think we are doing a better job of providing “best practices” within our projects.

For the past nine months, Lisa Errol, a midwife from New Zealand, has been treating pregnant women at the MSF clinic in a camp for internally displaced people in the Liberian town of Salala in Bong county.

Janthimala Price, a midwife from Australia, spent 20 months at the Arua Hospital AIDS Program in rural northwestern Uganda. The program was set up in July 2002 by the Arua Regional Referral Hospital Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) to treat HIV/AIDS patients.

Birgit Stümpfl, a German midwife, runs the MSF Chamanculo clinic for Prevention of Mother-To-Child Transmission (PMTCT).