Frontline Midwife: My Story of Survival and Keeping Others Safe

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I felt the need to read something “different” and when I saw this book and read the blurb, I felt I had to read it. The 41-year-old mother-of-one who now lives in Weymouth, Dorset, said: "Everyone deserves access to healthcare no matter where they are.

For me it resulted in a very important but hard to swallow book, and some serious reflection on my career goals. Anna's honesty about her own life, her flaws and her struggles opens a window to her inner conflicts and pain. I knew ‘Frontline Midwife’ would be a terrific book ever since Anna, who I once met in Bangladesh, told me she was writing it. During her time as a nurse she witnessed one woman who had walked for nine days to reach the centre where Anna was based – having no access to a midwife closer to where she lived – and Anna said she was at a dangerous point in labour. I recently started reading this book and couldn’t put it down (well apart from some shifts and uni work annoyingly getting in the way).I love the hopeful optimistic part at the end however, with her daughter on the beach it’s really was very emotional and made me cry. Anna has highs in her career, for example providing birthing kits for the traditional birthing assistants to use meaning less risk of infections, but with highs there are also lows, some of the procedures she has to do are horrific, its no wonder she has nightmares and suffers PTSD. Anna Kent is humanitarian aid worker after finishing master degree from Nottingham,she completed diploma from London and joined “Medicines Sans Frontiers,she worked in South Sudan,Haiti, Bangladesh and UK. Talking about the why she decided to document her experiences, Anna said that sometimes her role as a healthcare professional is to see the atrocities and speak out against them.

It also put how those who lose babies, be they full term or not have been treat in the UK, and the improvements that still need making and put into action. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. When offering training to these women she is told the only reason they are actually turning up is for the food etc on offer whilst they are there. The horrors at work continue for Anna on a daily basis, though she has a network of friends, mostly those she has worked with previously to talk to.Anna I am so sorry about your darling daughter Fatima but my heart screamed with delight at Aisha’s birth with the lovely and divine Nicky in attendance (what a gorgeous human being she is).

However bad it is here it’s infinitely better than some folks have it so the next time somebody feels like a good whinge about life in general this is a book I’d recommend they read. The affects that working in such a hostile environment with life-and-death decisions constantly left up to her clearly caused a huge amount of mental distress. This contributes to the fact that despite the strong focus on overseas midwifery, the book feels relevant to all midwives currently practicing.You can tell she really cares about her patients and profession and this shines through in the way she tells her stories. At twenty-six years old, Anna Kent helped a woman deliver her baby in a tropical storm by the light of a headtorch.

This is heartbreaking to read at times but you cannot turn away because you fall in love with Anna and want her to come through it all in one piece. I bet you didn’t have to walk for two days in hot tropical weather to reach your next appointment for a routine health check or watch a drip line suspended from the roof of a tent by a frayed piece of strong. I could not stop reading the extraordinary horrifying and yet beautiful story of Anna Kent’s experience in supporting women in war torn southern Sudan and in the refugee camps in Bangladesh. In her book Frontline Midwife, Anna shares her extraordinary experiences as a nurse, midwife and mother, illuminating the lives of women that are irreparably affected by compromised access to healthcare. However, after all the danger Anna sees and works in, it is a surfing accident that almost kills her.Having has a late miscarriage myself and gone through giving birth to a baby, in my case that I knew would never breath made me really identify with her. I have so much respect and love for midwives - especially the two who helped bring my three children safely into the world. I cried a lot reading Anna’s experiences but also smiled at her ability to find love, friendship and humour where she could in the bleakest of circumstances. I certainly cried reading most of it and really felt like I could connect with the people in the book.