South Community Birth Program - Vancouver BC midwife - Doula
THE MIDWIVES AND DOCTORS OF SCBP
Linda Knox - Registered Midwife
Linda is a registered midwife with over 25 years experience caring for women and their families throughout the childbearing cycle. She has contributed politically over many years to the establishment of midwifery as a regulated profession in BC. She was a partner, with Lee, in the first community based midwifery practice in Vancouver and is a Clinical Assistant Professor for the Division of Midwifery in the Department of Family Practice at UBC. She is currently the Acting Head of the Department of Midwifery at BC Women's hospital and St. Paul's hospital. She has been a member of the SCBP team since its inception and loves the multi-disciplinary approach to care. She has 3 grown children, Jasmine, Tanya and Tyson, two very cute grandsons and two energetic dogs! Linda enjoys training in Karate and loves to travel the world.
Kiran Nayar - Family Physician
Kiran is a family physician originally from Montreal. She grew up doing hospital rounds with her mother, a family physician. She followed in her footsteps and completed her medical degree at McGill University in Montreal at the tender age of 23. Since graduating, she has worked throughout rural BC and the Canadian Arctic. After years in the North, she is very excited to settle in Vancouver and join the dynamic and truly collaborative SCBP team of care givers. We all agree: Kiran is a perfect fit for our team. She thoroughly enjoys teaching our midwifery, nursing and medical students and loves providing maternity care. She has a special interest in adolescent and aboriginal health care. Kiran speaks French and is working on her Hindi. She loves to cook, dance, travel and she is currently learning (read- humbly trying) to surf.
Joan Robillard - Family Physician, SCBP Education Coordinator
Joan is a family physician originally from Montreal. She completed her medical school education at the University of Manitoba in 1985, and practiced in rural Quebec for 7 years prior to moving to Vancouver in 1993. She enjoys teaching and holds a Clinical Associate Professorship at UBC. She has been active in the women's movement and has provided maternity care for women from all walks of life for more than twenty years. She has been a member of the SCBP team since its inception and coordinates all of our midwifery, medical and nursing student placements. Joan lives with her partner Judith, her twin sister Claire and her nephew Nathan. She has 2 gorgeous grandchildren, Stella and Paloma. Judith's daughter, Carolina, the mother of Joan's grandchildren, has been a doula in our program and is applying to midwifery school! Joan speaks French and a little Spanish. She sings in a choir and loves to travel the world.
Lee Saxell - Registered Midwife, SCBP Medical Director
Lee trained as a midwife in the early 1980's, completed a Masters program in Midwifery Research in the UK in 1994, and has been a practicing midwife for over 30 years. She is currently the Program Leader at BC Women's Hospital of a multi-disciplinary Cesarean Task Force, which is promoting normal birth. She is a Clinical Associate Professor for the Division of Midwifery in the Department of Family Practice at UBC, and was faculty in the program, along with Liz, for several years. She was formerly the Head of Midwifery at BC Women's and St Paul's hospital; in 2009 this torch has been passed to Linda! She is the founding visionary member, along with Dr. Sue Harris, of the South Community Birth Program and is our Medical Director. She is a native of Vancouver and has two grown children, Maya and Joel, and one adorable dog, Lulu. Her passion is renovating old houses with her husband, Phil, and travelling the world.
Elizabeth Ryan - Registered Midwife
Liz is the eldest of six children and was born on a sheep station in the outback of Australia, where she first attended births (animals) in natural settings. Liz has been a midwife for over 25 years and a nurse for longer than she can remember. She has worked in a variety of settings, including BC Women's Hospital in their midwifery pilot project prior to the registration of midwifery in B.C. in 1998, where she was Department Head of Midwifery for several years after registration of midwifery. She passed the torch to Lee! She is a Clinical Associate Professor for Division of Midwifery in the Department of Family Practice at UBC and was faculty in the program, along with Lee, for several years. She is deeply committed to enhancing our learners experience at SCBP. Liz tried to retire in 2008 from her private midwifery practice in False Creek. The SCBP team gave her a two week grace period before pouncing and asking her to join our team! She was already missing being with the families during their journey through pregnancy and birth and is very happy to be part of the unique practice and wonderfully diverse nature of SCBP. Liz has one daughter, Kylie, and two gorgeous grandsons, plus a husband, Al, and four cats. Her hobbies include Masters swimming, biking, pilates and seriously and methodically travelling the world.
Lena Rowat - Registered Midwife
Born & raised in Vancouver, Lena was exposed to birth from an early age with her mother who practiced obstetrics as a family doctor. After receiving her Bachelor of Arts from Smith College in the US, she chose to pursue a youthful career of mountain adventure - teaching skiing, planting trees, and leading mountain expedition. During this time she accomplished her goal to ski through the wilderness from Vancouver to the Yukon, to climb Canada's highest peak. After a few months spent in medical school she realized her true calling was midwifery. She was fortunate to attend births in a hospital in Ethiopia, and while completing her midwifery training in Texas, where she worked largely with migrant Mexican families, she learned of the creation of SCBP and knew that this was where she wanted to practice upon returning to Vancouver. After practicing in Ontario, this finally became reality in the spring of 2009. Lena feels a great pride & joy to be part of the innovative and excellent team and program that we have here at SCBP. Lena still loves to ski, climb and spend time in the mountains, both here in BC and around the world.
Locum Extraordinaire - Susie Schulz, Registered Midwife
A locum is a practitioner who fills in for team members when they are sick or on vacations. Susie has been integral to our team by providing us with the comfort of knowing we can call on her to help. Her philosophy of care and style of practice are completely compatible with our own. Susie has a private practice at Pomegranate Midwives, where she focuses on doing home births. As well, she works for SCBP several times each month, primarily attending labours and births. Susie has become an integral part of our team and we can count on her to not just take care of you, but also to take care of all of us! Susie lives with her landscaper husband Mark in North Vancouver and is the mother of four children, 2 boys and 2 girls. She also loves to travel and finds time to do yoga!
OUR COMMUNITY HEALTH NURSE AND BREASTFEEDING EXPERT
Lori Wolf - Registered Nurse
Lori received her Masters degree in nursing in 1995. Prior to joining SCBP, she worked in several hospital Newborn Intensive Care Units, caring for sick babies and their families. Up until joining SCBP in 2008, she was faculty at the BC Institute of Technology, training nurses to care for sick babies. In her current role as the SCBP team leader of nursing, she provides breastfeeding and postpartum care, both in group sessions and in her postpartum clinics. As well as co-facilitating CP groups, Lori holds a postpartum drop-in group for SCBP clients every Wednesday afternoon from 12 to 2pm. Lori speaks Spanish and, like everyone else at SCBP, loves to travel. Lori and her husband, Sam, dropped everything a few years back and travelled and lived in Mexico for 2 years with their children Max (12), and Stella (10).
THE DOULA COORDINATOR
Jalana Grant - CD (DONA), LCCE
Jalana has been working with childbearing families as a doula since 1983. She is certified as a doula and Approved Birth Doula Trainer by DONA International. From 2000 to 2009, she was the Western Canada Director on DONA's International Board of Directors. Jalana is also a Certified Lamaze Childbirth Educator and has taught prenatal classes in the Vancouver area since 1989. Jalana has been with SCBP since the inception and has trained our doulas, designed the doula program and continues to be the Mentor/Mother to all the doulas in our program. Jalana participates in the labour and delivery Centering Pregnancy sessions and teaches our Preparation for Birth workshops. She is the mother of one young man, Kye, two young women, Teil and Sharai, and she has a very spoiled Golden Lab, Sadie the Wonder Dog! She lives in Langley with her husband, Chris, and loves her work with the SCBP. She loves travel and photographing her adventures!
THE SCBP TEAM - WE ARE FAMILY
You can sense a definite theme in the biographies of our team. We all love SCBP AND we love to travel the world! This year alone we will collectively visit: Chile (Joan), Cambodia and Laos (Lee), Jamaica (Liz and Linda), NYC (Jalana), Florida (Martha), Nicaragua (Kiran), California and Texas (Lori), Europe and Australia (Liz) Next year a few of us are planning to attend the International Congress of Midwives in Africa. Of course, we cannot all go at once so we carefully coordinate our time off and support each other to travel. When we can, we often travel together.
We cannot describe our SCBP family without talking about two of our beloved team members, both of whom died in 2009: Dr Sue Harris and Dr Kerry Telford Morrissey.
Sue Harris - Family Physician and Founding Member of SCBP
Sue was a founding visionary member of the SCBP and was passionately devoted to collaborative care, the Centering Pregnancy model, and our doula program. She was well known for one of her sayings, "We are on to something here!" Besides being a very skilled doctor and accoucheur, you could always count on Sue to do the right thing. She was diagnosed with cancer in 2007 and died in May 2009. Like everything Sue did in her life she did her dying well: she comforted all of her loved ones and came to peace with her death. Her son, Jonathon, is finishing up his residency in family medicine with a specialty in emergency medicine, Her daughter, Amy, is in her third of four years of midwifery school and was a student at SCBP in 2008.
Kerry Telford Morrissey - Family Physician
Kerry joined SCBP in 2005 and during her time with us she gave birth to two babies of her own, Claire and Sarah Grace. Kerry also worked at the Bridge Clinic one day a week, providing medical care to new immigrant and refugee families. She loved providing maternity care in a collaborative model and made sure she had a doula both times that she gave birth! Tragedy struck us through the heart on November 29, 2009, when Kerry and Sarah Grace were both killed in a seaplane crash returning from our annual SCBP retreat on Mayne Island. We remain close family with her husband, Patrick, and her daughter, Claire. We have also established an education fund for Claire. This picture was taken of the two of them at our retreat.
We are a tight knit team of care providers and our sorrow has brought us even closer together. We all value our working relationships and friendships and consider ourselves a family. We discuss our care plans daily in our electronic record, meet four hours every month for team meetings, have annual retreat weekends together, as well as an annual pot-luck dinner where we honour the doulas of SCBP.
Many of us have known each other for many years. Before SCBP, Joan was one of the few family physicians in Vancouver who provided back-up support to Lee, Linda, Susie and Liz, when we all attended home births prior to midwifery regulation. Linda and Lee were practice partners at The Midwifery Group; Susie also worked there. Liz and Lee were faculty together in the early days of the UBC Midwifery Program. Lee had the great pleasure of being the midwife for both Liz and Linda's daughters. Susie had the great pleasure of being the midwife for Joan's daughter-in-law at the birth of her granddaughter. Martha was our student in her fourth year of the midwifery program. Kiran was brought to us by Kerry, who said she would be a perfect fit. At the age of 6, Lena and her sister accompanied their physician mother and attended the home birth of Lee's daughter 32 years ago! Jalana was recommended to us in the early SCBP planning stage and has been with us ever since. Lori was recommended by a former client who was positive she would be a perfect fit as well. Right again. Lynda came with amazing references; every accolade has turned out to be true and she knows she can never leave SCBP.