Former midwife Linda McDonald is an inspiration to us all - Susan Dalgety
I can’t imagine what retired midwife Linda McDonald would have to say about the scathing report into her old workplace. She spent her entire nursing career dedicated to providing women and their babies with the best of care and not just in Edinburgh, but 5000 miles away in Malawi.
In 2005, she set up MUMs, a charity dedicated to raising enough money to build a new maternity unit in Malawi’s capital city, Lilongwe, to replace a notorious hospital wing in Bottom Hospital, once dubbed one of the worst places in the world to give birth.
Like Linda, I visited the old unit 20 years ago. The stench of blood and death has never left me. Teenage girls with pre-eclampsia lay dying on the bare concrete floor, as there were not enough beds.
Premature babies were swaddled in brightly coloured cotton and placed carefully in second-hand incubators, which were not switched on because there was no power.
Wails of despair echoed down the dark concrete corridors as women and girls gave birth on black plastic bags. The maternity unit, which delivered 12,000 babies a year, had only two doctors and four midwives. Four or five newborn babies died each day. It was hellish.
Linda McDonald was determined to do something about it, and she set about raising hundreds of thousands of pounds towards a new maternity wing, which opened in 2009.
She published three best-selling recipe books, organised a sell-out concert at the Usher Hall and sold calendars. Well-known Scots like Sir Tom Hunter and then First Minister Jack McConnell supported her cause.
She has now written a book about the MUMs campaign. All The Women tells the story of her relentless drive to improve the maternity care for some of the world’s most vulnerable women.
Sarah Brown, chair of the charity Theirworld, describes the book as a “masterclass in community fundraising.” It is also a blueprint for a better world, one where an Edinburgh midwife was so upset by the conditions in a maternity ward on the other side of the world that she dedicated the next few years of her life to improving the lives of women she will never meet.
Linda’s an inspiration to us all.