Maternal health pioneer celebrated at UTS Alumni Awards
Catherine Breen Kamkong receives 2017 UTS Health Alumni Award for Excellence
UTS nursing alumna Catherine Breen Kamkong has been recognised at the 2017 UTS Alumni Awards with the Award for Excellence from the Faculty of Health. Catherine is an internationally-lauded healthcare reformist who once dreamed of joining Australia’s Royal Flying Doctors, and now travels the world with the United Nations helping millions of people access better healthcare.
Whether tending to vulnerable refugees in Nepal or lobbying governments for better maternal, reproductive and sexual health programs, for Catherine, the dedication, hard work and rewards are the same.
“In healthcare you see the fruits of your labour,” she explains. “It’s why my mum became a nurse and my grandpa became a doctor. When I visited Mum at work I saw her making a difference for the patients every day and that was very appealing.
“A big lesson I learned at UTS was respect and empathy for each patient. It’s just a day at work for you, but it’s a really important day for that person and their family.”
Catherine enrolled in nursing at UTS in the early 1990s when Australia urgently needed more nurses. Soon after graduating she went to work in countries even more desperate for healthcare professionals.
Early stints with Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity and with Tibetan refugee camps in India motivated her to study the politics of healthcare. Catherine wrote her thesis on the impacts of conflict and confinement for young refugees, while treating refugee women at Sydney’s Liverpool Hospital.
“I was showing the women the birthing rooms saying, ‘here’s a bath, here’s a nice bed and here’s a ball you can sit on,’ and this woman laughed at me. She said, ‘back home I’d go by myself into the fields, deliver my baby by myself and come back’.”
“It struck me the terrible situations refugee women endure during their pregnancies. It motivated me to make a bigger difference for more women.”
Now Catherine is working on maternal health programs with experts like UTS’s Distinguished Professor of Midwifery Caroline Homer. In Cambodia, they have reduced the maternal death rate from 1,200 women per 100,000 in 1990, to 170 per 100,000 live births in 2014, by training midwives in emergency obstetric and newborn care techniques.
Midwives really save lives. We’re aiming to harness as much support as possible so we can drop the maternal and newborn death rates even further to reach the Sustainable Development Goals Target of 70 women per 100,000 live births by 2030.
Career Highlights
- Leader in mental, reproductive, sexual, adolescent, maternal and child health, working with vulnerable and displaced peoples across the world
- First Country Director for the International Rescue Committee in Myanmar
- Lead emergency response to Cyclone Nargis in 2008; developed emergency health, water and sanitation programs and negotiated humanitarian access into affected area
- Instrumental in establishing the Cambodian health sector response to survivors of violence, and quality midwifery education standards to reduce maternal deaths
Watch Catherine’s inspiring award acceptance speech here: https://youtu.be/Jqy8g0iZ90M
