Being an aid worker doesn’t just change and affect Anna’s work life and career path it also changes her personal relationships and her whole life path.

Frontline Midwife is an account of Anna Kent's time as a midwife in South Sudan, Bangladesh and the UK.The author really bears her soul, and I imagine that writing this book must be quite must’ve been quite cathartic .

I don't think I am spoiling anything by saying I was relieved to find her in a better place at the end of the book. She speaks of the coping and/or destructive ways in which she and others around her use to get through these experiences. In this case, I suppose it was somewhat easier in that she was unable to seek consent from her historic patients as she had no way of contacting them. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.

Looking back, I am proud I stepped up and did it, but it was a really difficult time," Anna said, noting how the nation will be experiencing the impact of the pandemic on our mental health for a long time to come.

As a student midwife aspiring to partake in humanitarian aid further down in my career, this book was life changing! To be honest, I thought this would be a book with lots of birth stories (which I love), and Kent’s experiences as a midwife. During her time as a nurse she witnessed one woman who had walked for nine days to reach the centre where Anna was based – having no access to a midwife closer to where she lived – and Anna said she was at a dangerous point in labour. Compare this with the fleeting connections she has with the women she treats, trying to cut through politics, patriarchal society and personal doubt to help the women and their babies.Frontline Midwife is Kent's compassionate testament to the critical work of healthcare professionals around the world. well written and compelling in a way that I felt like we were sat down with a cup of tea and she was telling me everything in the book personally to me. So many amazing and heart wrenching experiences that affected her on a personal level, I just wanted to give her a hug.

This book is an amazing read, about Anna, the perhaps more idealistic person she was at the very beginning of her career as an aid worker, how Anna dealt with things in her private life too.

Anna goes from being confident in what she has to do, to being in a panic she will never cope and wanting to head right back home, to ultimately not wanting to go home. An extraordinary, profoundly moving, all-consuming memoir that transports the reader deep into its world of heat, heartbreak, agonising moral dilemmas, and joy eked out against the backdrop of crisis. She describes the difficulties of working in the NHS, such as staffing shortages and fear of adverse outcomes, in a way that feels very recognisable. Her accounts are not for the faint hearted, and there are very graphic descriptions of what happens when things go wrong. Should they choose to have children, childbirth should be one of the most liberating and empowering moments of a woman's life.