GOLD Speakers

Margreet Wibbelink, PhD

• Country: South Africa

Biography:

Margreet co-Founded the Healthy Mom and Baby Clinic in Jeffrey’s Bay, South Africa (www.hmbc.co.za). This is a non-profit organization committed to delivering professional private care to the most vulnerable and underprivileged women of their community. She also works as a private midwife and is known as ‘The Surfing Midwife’ (www.thesurfingmidwife.com). She is currently the managing director at Sister Lilian Centre (www.sisterlilian.co.za) and Sensitive Midwifery (www.senstivemidwifery.co.za) a national education platform for midwives and parents. She finds herself in a transitioning stage where her local, small scale operations, are developing into a national and international platform to be a voice and champion the midwifery profession as a whole. This is in line with her PhD, which is looking at strategies to scale-up clinical midwifery practices in South Africa. She can call herself a pro-surfer as she has placed herself twice at the WSL World Longboarding Championship and still compete in various surfing competitions in South Africa.

She obtained her Bachelors degree in Midwifery from the Artevelde Hogeschool in Gent, Belgium (2002). She furthered her studies with a BcurHons in Advanced Midwifery and Neonatal Nursing Science (2012), a Master’s Research in Midwifery (2014) and a Doctorate in Philosophy (PhD) in Midwifery, all at the Nelson Mandela University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa.