Sharing global maternal health experiences • City, University of London

Students from the Global Maternal Health MSc spoke about their international placements

By Mr George Wigmore (Senior Communications Officer), Published Friday, 12^th January 2024

From working with midwives in Afghanistan to local parteras tradicionales in northern Ecuador, students from the Global Maternal Health (GMH) MSc shared the main lessons and outcomes from their international placements at an event on 5 December 2023.

Hosted by Dr Lucia Rocca-Ihenacho, Senior Lecturer in Midwifery in the School of Health and Psychological Sciences, the event featured six talks on a wide range of placements in different countries such as Germany, Sweden, India and the US, and it was attended by fellow students as well as staff members from the School.

Sharing placement stories

The GMH MSc is the only programme that focuses on the global implementation of midwifery and models of care based on continuity of care and midwife-led birth settings.

In her talk, Elisa Iaschi, a senior midwife and visiting lecturer at City who completed the programme in 2023, spoke about her placement and dissertation, which focused on implementing midwife-led birth centres in Afghanistan. This involved working closely with the Afghan Midwives Association to create culturally appropriate midwifery unit standards.

Irati Urbiola Íñiguez, a second-year GMH student, gives her talk.

Nina Negi, a Japanese-German midwife based in Berlin and a second-year GMH student, then discussed the structural development of maternity healthcare in Germany during her time with a midwife-led project group in a health ministry of a federal state in the country.

The focus then switched to South America, as Irati Urbiola Íñiguez, a second-year GMH student, spoke about her time shadowing parteras tradicionales, lay midwives who use ancestral knowledge, in northern Ecuador. The placement also involved workshops in the local community.

Moving back to Europe, Louise Carroll, a third-year student midwife, talked about her midwifery exchange with the Karolinska Institutet near Stockholm and the lessons learnt. This included differences and similarities between the Swedish and NHS models, and she said that the hospital she visited in Sweden had lower rates of intervention with ventouse and they don’t use forceps at all.

Dr Lucia Rocca-Ihenacho speaking at the event.

Promoting the midwifery-led model

Frances Rivers, a GMH student and Consultant Midwife at Kingston Hospital, spoke about a one-week visit to a reproductive and sexual health service centre in Memphis, one of the poorest cities in the US. Highlighting the positive impact on marginalised communities that the centre is having, Frances also talked about how it promotes the midwifery-led model and philosophy, a relatively unusual occurrence in the US as less than 2% of births are in such a setting.

Finally, Elisabetta Conti, a GMH student, spoke about her placement in India, where she worked with the stakeholders at the Fernandez Hospital in Hyderabad to co-produce a continuous improvement plan for the midwifery booking clinic.

Speaking about the event, Dr Rocca-Ihenacho said:

This year we were extremely privileged to have the opportunity to listen to six great speakers who had experiences of sexual and reproductive health services and projects in a wide range of settings. There are commonalities in the experiences with a focus on human and reproductive rights as well as the struggle to implement and scale up midwifery as a way to ensure respectful care. Sexual and reproductive rights are human rights!

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