Kim Dau Story Transcript

My full name is Kim Quang Đâu, and I joined the Duke Midwifery Service as my first job post-graduation. So, I graduated from Duke as an undergrad. I had my BS in biology. And during my time there, I actually met Amy MacDonald, who was the service lead of the midwifery group at Duke. And she had introduced me to midwifery through one of the elective courses that I had taken.

Amy was in her scrubs, running over from a shift. She is very animated, and is an excellent storyteller. Really knows how to draw in her audience. And she also really hit the nail on the head for me by bringing in a video for us to watch. It was a clip from… a Monty Python film. And in this clip – I think it’s probably the segment called “Birth” – they’re rolling a woman down a hospital hallway on a gurney, with the gurney slamming open all of the doors and with the person in the gurney. And then they land in a very sterile-looking operating room space with a ton of machines, cold metal, clean surfaces, that [is] quite institutional. And the clip sort of plays out with the surgeons losing track of the patient, and being quite focused on impressing the administrator [and] how they’re making best use of the bottom line. And the patient was lost in it all. And the miracle of birth, as it were, was in this fantastic satire probably the least important part. And even though it was satire, you know, as good satire does, it resonated with me in terms of ways in which I felt the healthcare system had failed us, or is failing us, and pointed out a really big need for more humanity in healing and wellness. And that’s something that the practice of midwifery seemed to better fill.

I just had a strong conviction that healthcare could be better, or should be better. When I learned about midwifery from Amy, I think what struck me was she was practicing midwifery, which at its heart is philosophically quite radical. And she was practicing it in a rather conservative space. And that piqued my interest. Like, how is it that you can bring something that is ultimately fundamentally challenging of the status quo? And what does it mean to bring it into this space that centers around the revered tradition of Western medicine?

And I stayed in touch with Amy while I was pursuing midwifery studies, and was lucky enough that they were hiring at the time that I graduated. And I interviewed for the position and was very excited to return back to Duke … When I was at UCSF, I was trained by midwives who had a lot of experience, who had established Centering Pregnancy programs … not only within the clinic, but [they had] built partnerships with community groups, so that the health care model could be extracted from the clinic, and embedded in these community spaces. Which, again, is something more aligned with what I think the midwifery philosophy really espouses.

I had some really excellent models back in San Francisco. Margy Hutchison here in San Francisco, she was leading the build-out of the Centering Pregnancy program in the San Francisco community at a site called Homeless Prenatal. And so I did exactly what they did. Oh, and also my dear colleague, Rebekah Kaplan. She held Centering groups at Hilltop High School in San Francisco, which was a high school for pregnant and parenting teens. They did the same thing. They had a little suitcase, a little, like, carry-on luggage-size bag. And they would bring – back then it was paper charts, right? So they would bring the paper charts in the suitcase, they would bring Dopplers, and measuring tape to measure bellies. We had blood pressure cuffs, a scale, sort of the basics of a prenatal clinic, stripped down and put into this little suitcase. And El Centro Hispano… we had made some connections there. And I gained their support and enthusiasm for the idea. And we built out several groups that met at El Centro. They had a space that they used for their childbirth classes … There was the group space, and then I built a sort of private corner where there was a table with a blanket over it, or something like that. And then behind that was this double-high air mattress that could accommodate pregnant people, so that they don’t have to get very low.

I think what I would describe as what I was learning was learning how powerful the role of healthcare provider is. It’s just – these visits, especially the group visit, there’s such a point of exchange, right? Healthcare is an exchange and partnership. Exchange and partnership. And I think the power of that – to now be in a role that held such great responsibility – was quite humbling. … I got to experience more directly what it was like to have the health care provider conceptualized as a community member. As someone who, I don’t know, became a part of something, right? It was a joining. It’s a very different feeling than when I work in a clinic and see people one-to-one. In that space, there’s less opportunity to get to know people personally. When you sit in a group, even though it’s a group space, you gain a lot more learning about people’s personalities and how they are. You develop a relationship where there’s trust. In the one-to-one visits, it’s also an exchange, but it feels much more transactional and not relational.

Read a transcript of the full interview here.