It’s 2004 and as a family we decided to move to Antigua …… so I left Burton and went back to Heartlands to update my clinical labour ward skills ready to work in the Caribbean as a midwife. It was great to be back and update my skills I did …… but sadly the Bereavement Midwife was off sick and I ended up taking over most of that role during my time there on the new Willow Suite. She has since sadly died and is greatly missed …..RIP Amanda.
I replicated the Study Days I had put on at Queen’s and they were extremely well received …… I got more and more heavily involved with Sands and was asked to join the International Stillbirth Alliance which I was so proud to do as they improve the care and reduce the rate of stillbirths globally. It seemed that being a Bereavement Midwife was now in my blood.
So we headed off to the sunshine and what I thought would be the most amazing experience of my life, both personally and professionally ……… how wrong can a girl be?
I’m talking professionally not personally ……although I think anyone who has moved their family abroad will agree it’s not as simple as it sounds.
It took me around 18 months to get “Registered” as a midwife in Antigua ……and trust me I have never had so many doors not only shut ….. but slammed openly in my face. It was a living nightmare to say the least and I won’t even mention the policeman at Immigration ….. that’s a story in itself
I’m not going to write much about working in the Caribbean on here as firstly I don’t think I would be believed and also it’s way too distressing.I t’s enough to say that for an island where only 1000 babies were born each year ….., a totally disproportionate amount of babies and moms died and no one seemed to be accountable. If I thought I had encountered bullying in the NHS ….. it was another level here altogether!
Not long after moving to Antigua I was invited as a guest to the International Stillbirth Alliance Conference in Norway and here I was elected on to the Board by National Sands UK because of the work I had done around the UK with my Study Days and so on …… I was honoured.
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