Kate Edmonds is an Australian midwife with a background in sexual violence care who worked in rural and remote Australia before joining MSF. She has worked in Peshawar Women’s Hospital in Pakistan, in the ‘hospital on the hill’ in Kutupalong, Bangladesh, and most recently in the world’s second largest refugee camp in Uganda.
“What is exciting for me is that sexual and reproductive healthcare for women in Médecins Sans Frontières’ projects is led by midwives. A lot of the decision-making is on us. But it is important that those decisions be made within a patient-centred approach.
That’s part of the training I provide in our projects and for me, it’s really about role modelling. It starts with how we treat a woman when she first walks in. We do not stand over the chair and talk to her, we pull a chair up and we have a discussion.
Even in Australia our system is not there yet, but for the midwives in Pakistan and in Bangladesh, it was a whole new way of operating. I concentrated a lot on that first moment with the woman. We didn’t talk about what we’re going to do; instead, we listened to her story, her history, made observations about what we saw, and planned with her how we could make a difference for her for her current delivery, or her next.