Kybele is excited to announce a new partnership with Health Volunteers Overseas (HVO). A long-standing Washington, D.C.-based non-profit organization, HVO is dedicated to improving the availability and quality of health care in developing countries through the training and education of local heealth care providers. With their complementary visions, Kybele and HVO are teaming up to send DR. Amy Mauritz as a volunteer to Kybele’s Ghana project site in January 2015. Dr. Mauritz is completing her medical residency at Duke University and has received numerous distinctions, including honors in anesthesiology, family medicine and obstetrics and gynecology. She will be sponsored by HVO as a part of its Society for Education in Anesthesia Traveling Fellows program and will focus on Kybele’s quality-improvement initiatives related to obstetric anesthesia at Ridge Regional Hospital in Ghana’s capital, Accra.
Mauritz’s passion for international health reaches back two generations to her grandmother and namesake, Amy Hayble Egberuare, who grep up in a poor family in rural Nigeria and was sent to England by missionaries in her village to be trained as a midwife. Upon return to Nigeria, Dr. Mauritz’s grandmother used her skills to open a maternity home in her village that gave local women something they never had access to before: a safe, clean, and skilled facility to give birth in. Her grandmother’s passion instilled in Mauritz a desire to promote safe childbirth among vulnerable populations worldwide and improve medical care in developing nations to prevent needless loss of maternal and neonatal life.
Mauritz will bring her medical expertise, obstetric anesthesia skills, and long-standing passion to work along side Ghanaian clinicians. Together, they will work to increase local providers’ capacity to improve childbirth outcomes. Kybele is delighted to collaborate with Mauritz and Health Volunteers Overseas in this exciting overseas opportunity.