Miranda Wiggelinkhuizen (1983) has always had a special interest in paediatrics. Before starting as resident in the MD Global Health program, she worked for a year as medical doctor in the paediatrics department of the UMC Utrecht. Miranda graduated as MD Global Health in 2011 and subsequently worked for Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) in Pakistan, Congo-Brazzaville and the Democratic Republic Congo (DRC). She combined fieldwork in surgery, gynaecology and paediatrics with research at the MSF headquarters in Amsterdam. Due to the high caseload of young (under-five) patients, Miranda spent most of her time in neonatology and paediatrics. Working for MSF also involved doing outreach programs such as screening for malnutritioned children and immunizing children against infectious diseases. She relied on management and logistics knowledge gained in the Dutch Tropical Course (NTC) at the KIT Royal Tropical Institute while dealing with an outbreak of cholera in Congo-Brazzaville and used triage systems taught during training while receiving and treating victims of a civil war in the DRC.
These skills in management, logistics, patient safety and education have proven to be invaluable and almost just as important as the medical knowledge gained when she started as resident paediatrics at the Erasmus MC-Sophia Kinderziekenhuis and the Erasmus MC in Rotterdam in 2013. Her background as MD Global Health has made Miranda a versatile doctor. She has worked as ship doctor on a tall ship race between Auckland and Sydney and during her paediatric residency, Miranda went back to low income settings several times, conducting short missions in French-Guyana in the Amazone. In less than a year from now, Miranda will be a registered paediatrician. Coming November, she will travel with her partner and little daughter Sophie to Cape Town to further specialize in paediatric intensive care medicine. She is convinced that the broad experience she gained in the past will help her in this new African chapter.
For more information about Médecins sans Frontières, visit: www.msf.org or www.azg.nl
Then:
Photo 1: Miranda and local colleagues discuss patients during rounds in the paediatrics department for Doctors Without Borders/ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) Congo- Brazzaville.
Photo 2: The Children’s ward in Congo-Brazzaville.
Now:
Photo 1: Miranda at work in the Erasmus MC as paediatrics resident.
Photo 2: Arriving by boat for consultations during a mission in French Guyana.