When midwifery lecturer Farida Yesmin arrived at a hospital in south-west Bangladesh, she was expecting to teach student midwives. She ended up saving a baby’s life. “I wanted to see the maternity ward. A woman who had just given birth was really ill and the only nurse on duty was busy looking after her. Support staff told me her baby had died,” said Farida.

Seeing the apparently lifeless baby on the resuscitation table, Farida checked and detected a faint pulse. “I cleared the baby’s airways and began CPR. I kept doing this for 30 minutes until we could get him to the newborn intensive care unit where he began to breathe on his own,” she said.

The baby and his mother, Khadiza, were lucky that Farida, who had received World Health Organization training to teach midwifery, happened to be there. Bangladesh has a severe shortage of trained midwives. Nationally, just 32% of women are looked after by a skilled attendant while giving birth.

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