Harriet Nayiga is a Bachelor of Science in Midwifery (BScM) student at SONAM Uganda and class representative for BScM 2018.
A practicing midwife, Harriet was born in Masaka, Uganda. Following her outstanding performance in the A-Levels in 2009, she was offered a government scholarship to undertake a Diploma in Midwifery at the Mulago School of Nursing and Midwifery. During that period, she also volunteered as a casualty nurse in the same hospital.
In nursing school, Harriet was recognised with the 2013 Midwife of the Year award. After graduating, she was recommended to work with Wakisa Ministries, an organisation that offers pregnancy care, temporary shelter and counselling for teenagers with crisis pregnancies. Here, she spent three years working as a full-time house mother and took care of pregnant adolescents. She organised antenatal clinics, conducted training on birth preparedness and gave health education talks.
During her time at Wakisa, Harriet realised that there were major challenges in the provision of maternal healthcare services. She decided to study further to become a more competent midwife and joined AKU in Kampala to undertake a BScM and is set to graduate in February 2019. Currently, she engages the community in health education matters such as testing for sexually transmitted infections, HIV and hepatitis B. Here, she shares her thoughts about her career:
Q: Tell us a little about yourself.
A: I am a professional midwife with four years of experience and am now pursuing my BScM at the School of Nursing and Midwifery's Kampala Campus while training at Mulago National Referral Hospital. I am really interested in adolescents and youth sexual and reproductive health. My mission is to help them pass those developmental stages with better health choices and behavioural practices.
Q: Did you always want to be a midwife?
A: My childhood dream was to become a nurse. This was a profession l grew up hearing about in the community where I was raised. I heard about it from my mother, playmates and over the radio. Little did I know that there was the option of midwifery, which is an independent profession. I was born and raised in a rural setting with pregnant women treated by traditional birth attendants (TBAs). These were elderly women and herbalists with little or no scientific knowledge of midwifery. This deprived me of role models in the health profession, including midwives.
Q: You joined SONAM in 2016. How has your experience been so far?
A: I always say that AKU is the right place for me to pursue my course. My experience has been exciting because I’ve been studying in a conducive environment that facilitates my learning. At AKU, I’ve seen lecturers who individualise the needs of each student and totally devote themselves to helping and supporting a student towards attaining her objectives.
Personally, I’ve been transformed. I believe that this change is noticeable at my places of work through the improved quality of midwifery care and in communities where I provide health sensitisation. I believe AKU is training world-changers. AKU also helped me in another way: I could not have met the financial requirements of the programme without the partial scholarship awarded to me by the University.
Q: Why are such programmes important?
A: Such programmes act as eye-openers for a midwife/nurse to not only wait to inject a patient or assist in delivery but to use critical thinking skills in providing holistic care to women and families. The programmes provide evidence-based knowledge that enables a midwife/nurse to deliver culturally sensitive and friendly health services.
Q: How can we best sensitise the community to the importance of midwifery?
A: We cannot just talk about the importance of midwifery. The importance should manifest from the clinical areas. This can be done by providing friendly, individualised care to communities. In the developing world, a number of factors such as poverty, long distances and poor transport systems, among others, hinder mothers from reaching health facilities.
Therefore, midwifery services should not wait for patients to reach the centres but must be accessible to people in the community who need it the most. I think this is why TBAs and herbalists have been good for communities. For example, in my community, I can encounter up to five herbalists daily who use the door-to-door approach to explain the importance of their services, unlike midwifery services.
As midwives, we are also trained to be educators, counsellors, researchers, leaders and advocates for communities. We should engage the community together with political, cultural and religious leaders through different platforms. These platforms could include community radios, home visits, village meetings, churches, schools, village theatres, sports competitions and walk and marathon programmes. There is also a need for midwives to engage in leadership at the community level so that our voices can be heard. This is when a friendly and healthy relationship will be created between midwives and local people. This will enable midwives to discover the community’s health needs and address them appropriately. After that local people will start to seek out our services.
