Margreet co-Founded the Healthy Mom and Baby Clinic in Jeffrey’s Bay, South Africa (www.hmbc.co.za). This is a non-profit organization committed to delivering professional private care to the most vulnerable and underprivileged women of their community. She also works as a private midwife and is known as ‘The Surfing Midwife’ (www.thesurfingmidwife.com). She is currently the managing director at Sister Lilian Centre (www.sisterlilian.co.za) and Sensitive Midwifery (www.senstivemidwifery.co.za) a national education platform for midwives and parents. She finds herself in a transitioning stage where her local, small scale operations, are developing into a national and international platform to be a voice and champion the midwifery profession as a whole. This is in line with her PhD, which is looking at strategies to scale-up clinical midwifery practices in South Africa. She can call herself a pro-surfer as she has placed herself twice at the WSL World Longboarding Championship and still compete in various surfing competitions in South Africa.
She obtained her Bachelors degree in Midwifery from the Artevelde Hogeschool in Gent, Belgium (2002). She furthered her studies with a BcurHons in Advanced Midwifery and Neonatal Nursing Science (2012), a Master’s Research in Midwifery (2014) and a Doctorate in Philosophy (PhD) in Midwifery, all at the Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa.
Despite a steady drop globally in maternal and newborn deaths since 1990, thousands of women and newborns still die each year during pregnancy and childbirth. South Africa, together with other countries, failed to achieve the Millennium Development Goal of reducing maternal mortality by three quarters by 2015. This is despite the positive efforts made in the country towards achieving these goals. However, much more still needs to be done. For that reason, proper and safe care of labouring women remains the identified major focus to prevent these deaths.
The study was the culmination of an investigation into the problem of poor performance regarding maternal and perinatal outcomes as identified by the researcher. The aim of the study was to understand the experiences and perceptions of the women and the midwives regarding the clinical practices in public maternity units in South Africa in order to facilitate the scaling-up of the midwifery practice.
The study found that midwives were committed to provide quality care but major factors needed to be addressed to facilitate scaling-up of clinical midwifery practices. The midwifery profession needed to be strengthened and an enabling working environment provided. Based on the results of the study as well as the theoretical, conceptual and contextual framework, two strategies were developed:
Strategy 1: Empowering midwives to deliver woman-centred care in public sector maternity units
Strategy 2: Creating an enabling work environment in order to deliver woman-centred care in public sector maternity units
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