Case study from Uganda: Robina, Senior Midwife

By Joy Kemp on 01 February 2018 Uganda Global midwifery

"Being a part of the MOMENTUM community has meant that I can mentor my students," says Robina. "Before the MOMENTUM project, we viewed students only as a source of manpower for cleaning, collecting supplies, taking samples, taking patients to theatre, etc. Our midwives had not been trained to be mentors and students were not assigned specific mentors. Students could come to the health facility without set objectives and there were too many students allocated to one midwife. I have received so much support from the UK midwives, in particular Kade, my twin who visited us twice and supports us virtually through WhatsApp."

Kade Mondeh is an RCM member and consultant midwife from Barts and The London NHS Trust who went to Uganda for two four-week placements in 2016 and 2017.

"I have increased in confidence and have developed my leadership skills," Robina continues. "The project workshops were beneficial and through them I learned a lot about mentorship. I also had an exchange visit to the UK. Together with Kade, we made changes in the learning environment: we put proper infection control and prevention in place and the labour ward was transformed with a clean environment, solar power, partitions for privacy and equipment for effective delivery. We also began to get more support from the local health administration.

"My midwifery staff have developed a positive approach to mentoring students and through MOMENTUM three of them were trained as qualified and knowledgeable mentors, equipped with reference information," says Robina. "Now we have improved communication between the midwifery schools, universities and our health centre. Students are mentored as per their set objectives and they are assigned specific mentors. The students evaluate their mentors and the mentors evaluate the students. Students express their learning, fears and recommendations on the reflective grid. There are improved student-mentor relationships and students receive more supervision and more hands on experience. We are very grateful for the opportunity to be involved in this project."