A WEYMOUTH woman has detailed her rewarding but tough work as a frontline midwife in conflict zones and refugee camps in her new book due to be released next week.
Anna Kent, who is now a nurse at Dorset County Hospital and a community midwife for Weymouth and Portland, worked in South Sudan, Haiti and Bangladesh over a ten-year period.
Her inspiring work includes running a hospital in a civil war zone, helping set up a cholera treatment centre after a natural disaster and setting up a birth unit in a refugee camp.
Anna, who moved to Weymouth with her five-year-old daughter in 2017, said: “My first placement was as a volunteer nurse in South Sudan. For a year I ran a small hospital that was made of small mug huts (tukuls). I had one other international nurse and ten Sudanese nurses to work with. We were the only health care providers in a geographical area the size of Belgium.”
In 2010, Anna returned to the UK to train as a midwife before heading to Haiti – there she helped set up a cholera treatment centre which saw 3000 patients in one month with a 99 per cent survival rate.
Then, in Bangladesh, whilst working in a refugee camp of 30,000 people she oversaw all female and pregnancy health. After witnessing women dying due to lack of health care, she set up a birth unit which saw 100 safe births a month and still runs today.
Anna added: “The work was pretty tough as humanitarian crises are always complicated. Discharging a new mother from the hospital, back to the war or refugee camps was really hard. I could not protect them as soon as they left my facilities.”
“Although we saved the lives of most of the people who came to us, it is the ones we could not save that still sit heavy on my shoulders. This is one reason why I wanted to write my book, to speak out on their behalf. Everyone deserves access to a trained midwife, regardless of where in the world they happen to live.”
Anna’s book Frontline Midwife – My Story of Survival and Keeping Others Safe is released on Thursday, May 12 and can be purchased at all major bookstores.
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