Mergy Gayatri MSc

Biography

I am a midwife with +10 years of experience in maternal health, midwifery, research, and education. I graduated with a B. App. Sc in Midwifery (University of 'Aisyiyah Yogyakarta, Indonesia) and an MSc in Midwifery (The University of Nottingham, UK). In addition to my main job of teaching and preparing future Indonesian midwives at Universitas Brawijaya Indonesia, I led initiatives with paramount issues that need to be addressed in maternal health and urgently faced by women in developing countries.

Before joining the NPEU, with Summit Institute for Development, I contributed to the development of OptiBP: Cuffless optical blood pressure measurement, which provides a crosscut solution to detect hypertension in pregnant women and the general population. This initiative was developed under the notion that the leading cause of maternal mortality for pregnant women worldwide is 31.6%, while in Indonesia itself, it reached 14.5%. This initiative stands on the understanding that digital health could benefit and help people's lives in the 21st century. Further, the understanding is that the essential problems faced in the public health sector in Indonesia are the lack of skills & knowledge of health workers, poor support from health workers' peers in providing good clinical decision-making, and disconnected information between health workers, hence created bad clinical decision for patients. Thus, we continued the initiative in developing the BUNDA App, where the previous initiative of cuffless optical blood pressure met with better antenatal decision support through referral. I led the BUNDA App to address these issues, where it connects information between midwives and empowers them through knowledge and skill improvements. These two initiatives that I co-led have helped to save pregnant women's lives.

My research interests focus on the quality of maternal and neonatal service delivery. I am currently studying DPhil in Population Health, focusing on intermittent auscultation fetal monitoring during labor in low- and middle-income countries, supervised by Associate Professor Rachel Rowe, and Associate Professor Manisha Nair. This study aims to improve the quality of fetal heart rate monitoring done by midwives in low-resource settings.