BO­BIE-LEE DIXON

(bo­bie-lee.dixon@guardian.co.tt)

The term 'male mid­wife' may send your brow up. But, in­deed, there are male mid­wives—and al­though a hand­ful they do ex­ist. It's on­ly been 40 years since males were al­lowed to train in the UK, but it is a grow­ing pro­fes­sion in parts of Eu­rope.

On Oc­to­ber 24 the Irish Ex­am­in­er pub­lished the death of Patrick White, the on­ly male mid­wife to have worked at Cork Uni­ver­si­ty Ma­ter­ni­ty Hos­pi­tal.

On Oc­to­ber 22 T&T re­ceived its first li­cenced male mid­wife. At 32 years old, Kerne Ram­nath suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed the mid­wifery li­cen­sure ex­am, which now al­lows for him to le­git­i­mate­ly prac­tice mid­wifery in T&T.

It was while study­ing nurs­ing that Ram­nath be­came at­tract­ed to the prac­tice of mid­wifery. Pri­or, nurs­ing was not a ca­reer goal of his; rather he want­ed to be­come a po­lice­man.

“My mom found the ad in the news­pa­per and asked me if I would do nurs­ing and I said yes,” he tells the Sun­day Guardian.

But once train­ing be­gan, Ram­nath's mind changed about the armed ser­vice. He quick­ly fell in love with nurs­ing and found it to be quite ful­fill­ing.

His love for the pro­fes­sion grew once he was ex­posed to mid­wifery dur­ing a train­ing ex­er­cise that in­volved be­ing as­signed to the ma­ter­ni­ty de­part­ment of a pub­lic hos­pi­tal.

“I was im­me­di­ate­ly in­trigued and I told my­self then, maybe in the fu­ture I could fol­low up on this,” Ram­nath re­calls.

The fu­ture came, but in 2013 when the Port-of-Spain res­i­dent ap­plied for the mid­wifery pro­gramme of­fered by the Min­istry of Health in con­junc­tion with the Min­istry of Ed­u­ca­tion, he was turned down. But this did not faze Ram­nath and he ap­plied again in 2016, this time gain­ing a favourable out­come.

To his suc­cess, Ram­nath cred­it­ed the 2013 amend­ment of the Nurs­es and Mid­wife Act, which made pro­vi­sion for males to be ac­cept­ed to be trained as mid­wives in a more "def­i­nite way".

He de­scribes mid­wifery as a re­spon­si­bil­i­ty that one can­not ex­plain or place a mon­e­tary val­ue to. "God is putting you there to guard this door for Him, you have to en­sure both moth­er and ba­by are safe."

Baf­fled by the many sto­ries of­ten heard about the al­leged hor­rif­ic treat­ment some moth­ers ex­pe­ri­ence dur­ing labour at the hands of med­ical staff, par­tic­u­lar­ly at pub­lic hos­pi­tals, Ram­nath says, "If any of these sto­ries are true, they were trained well and they know bet­ter."

But he was al­so very quick to make a clear dis­tinc­tion, "Mid­wifery is a sep­a­rate pro­fes­sion from the nurs­ing pro­fes­sion. It is gov­erned by its own In­ter­na­tion­al Con­fed­er­a­tion of Mid­wives (ICM) and should not be con­fused with a spe­cial­ty area in nurs­ing."

He said dur­ing labour, a mid­wife or any­one de­liv­er­ing a ba­by must be cour­te­ous, car­ing, en­cour­ag­ing, and knowl­edge­able about the de­liv­ery process.

"It doesn't mat­ter the time of day or the mood you're in. It takes one's abil­i­ties 100 per cent past just be­ing a nurse."

It's al­so Ram­nath's be­lief that more men should seek out the pro­fes­sion, as he said it would al­low them to have a greater ap­pre­ci­a­tion for the woman and her abil­i­ty to birth a child.

"Ul­ti­mate­ly you re­spect the women in your life a lot more and ap­pre­ci­ate this hu­man be­ing called a woman."

But fur­ther to this, the fa­ther of one said mid­wifery de­vel­ops one's pa­tience, com­pas­sion, and re­spon­si­bil­i­ty.

Aside from the prac­tice of mid­wifery, Ram­nath is cur­rent­ly pur­su­ing man­age­ment and pub­lic ad­min­is­tra­tion stud­ies, for which he in­tends to utilise in the fu­ture when he opens his own med­ical cen­tre.

He thanked the North West Re­gion­al Health Au­thor­i­ty, for the op­por­tu­ni­ty he re­ceived to train in mid­wifery through its schol­ar­ship pro­gramme, and the ma­ter­ni­ty staff at the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal, whom he said was ex­tra­or­di­nar­i­ly sup­port­ive dur­ing his pe­ri­od of train­ing.