The Toughest Place to be a Midwife, Mother, Child...
The third in the BBC Series, “The Toughest Place to be a… Midwife” is an hour length documentary that follows young midwife, Suzanne Saunders-Blundell, as she leaves the comfort of her job in Good Hope hospital, Sutton Coldfield, to spend two weeks in Liberia, West Africa. Suzanne wished to experience midwifery in one of the poorest areas of Liberia, Monrovia, where 8/10 people live on $1 a day. During the civil war several years earlier, Redemption, the hospital she was assigned to was closed down, and has recently been reopened thanks to charities. However, with a shortage of money and staff, the hospital is a world away from the epidurals and private rooms in Good Hope. The Toughest Place is an eye-opening, rollercoaster of a programme which makes you appreciate the amount of medical care we receive in British hospitals, as Suzanne spends her two weeks at Redemption, she is forced to come to terms with their system: three rooms, one for labour, one for delivery and one for aftercare. There is no special care here; it can be as little as two midwives to seven women in labour, so there is no time to ask the women how they wish to give birth or their preferences. In a country with less than 100 doctors, Suzanne has to forget the ‘slow and steady’ labour she is used to, which she finds overwhelming at times, especially when 1/12 Liberian women die during childbirth, and she has to experience this first hand. Redemption is the only free hospital in Liberia and it becomes clear throughout the hour the determination and hard work the midwives must put in to their $60 a month jobs. This documentary is both moving and quite sad. It is not for the faint-hearted but is fully recommended otherwise.
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