What does a midwife do at Doctors Without Borders?
As a midwife working for Doctors Without Borders / Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), your ability to deal with women at risk and respond to emergencies will be utilised regularly. Your experience in both complicated and normal deliveries will be essential.
As a midwife, your role will be to provide obstetrical care to pregnant women and their babies, doing follow-up before, during and after delivery, according to Doctors Without Borders obstetrical and reproductive health protocols, universal hygienic and newborn caring standards, in order to ensure their health conditions and avoid post-delivery complications.
As part of our commitment to reducing mortality, morbidity, and suffering, your role may vary from setting up a maternal and child health department to a small rural clinic, establishing a program to respond to sexual violence within a refugee population, and treating patients in an urban hospital. Your role will also include ensuring access to safe abortion care.
Community outreach forms an integral part of our maternity programs. Understanding how Traditional Birth Attendants work and building effective relationships with them is important for developing and accepting our programmes within the communities they support.
Some of the responsibilities as midwife include:
- the reinforcement of the implementation of standardized protocols for pregnancy and delivery care, sexual violence victim care, family planning, prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV/AIDS, prevention of sexually transmitted disease, abortion care, etc.
- organisational aspects (human resource management, pharmacy management, gathering of statistical data, etc), as well as training supervision, evaluation and guidance of team members.
- Tina Popa, midwife, delivers triplets in South Sudan
Tina Popa is an Irish midwife who worked at the Doctors Without Borders hospital at Bentiu camp in South Sudan. Here she shares her experience, helping deliver not one baby, but triplets!
"Bentiu was my first time working with Doctors Without Borders.
"The emergency call to the maternity ward at our hospital at Bentiu camp in South Sudan came during my shift. A 26-year-old expectant mother had arrived. Her waters had broken prematurely. She didn't know she was having triplets. The situation was critical.
"Within five hours of the mother arriving, I had another call from the ward to say she was pushing. She gave birth to the first baby, a little boy who was very vigorous and weighing a healthy 1.8kg - quite big for a triplet. Usually in multiple pregnancy, after the first baby is born, the second would arrive within an hour or two.
"One hour passed, two hours, three hours… The babies inside had normal heartbeats and the mother’s vital signs were good. We performed another ultrasound to confirm the position of the babies, and all looked well.
"We decided to let the mother rest, and she started breastfeeding her newborn. A few hours later, I went to sleep because everything was under control. Word had travelled fast in the community that a mother was expecting triplets. Local women came to check on her and see if she needed anything.
"At that point we were expecting the next two babies to arrive at any moment. 24 hours passed, then 48, and then 72 hours! 90 hours after the mother had arrived at the hospital, I woke to a call from the maternity ward, to say the mother had given birth to the second baby and that everything was fine. Twenty minutes later, they called again to tell me the third baby had been born. I could hear the new babies – both boys - crying over my walkie talkie.
"Everyone was well and they told me that the second baby was 2kg and the third baby was 1.9kg. It was impressive for all three babies to have such a good weight and to be well.
"It was a great experience, probably one I will never witness in my career again. I left the project in Bentiu just two days later, and I cannot be more grateful for this opportunity."
Requirements
- Compliance with Essential Criteria
- Bachelor's Degree in midwifery
- 2 years experience as midwife (extensive experience in managing prenatal and post-natal check up, normal delivery, complicated delivery and delivery such as breech, twins and shoulder dystocia, will be a big asset), and at least 1 year of working experience in a tropical context is an asset
- Management experience is an asset
- Experience in family planning and mother-child health care
- Willingness to provide care in line with our policy and protocols concerning women's health
- Availability of 6 - 12 months per each assignment
- Adhere to our Behavioral Commitments and MSF Charter.
Assets
- Advanced Life Support in Obstetrics course (ALSO)
- Experience or study in tropical medicine, refugee health or international public health
- Knowledge of STD and HIV/AIDS
- Available to work infield for 9+ months
Start your application process to join our team. You will be directed to the MSF Hong Kong recruitment website to submit your application.