Off the beaten track

Hennie Wijnen started her own midwifery practice after finishing her programme, but her deepseated curiosity led her towards research. There she hopes to hand the torch on to equally curious students.

How do you end up in research as a midwife? The basis, according to Hennie, is curiosity. "That's a crucial trait for researchers, and I've had it from the outset." After her shortened two-year programme (Hennie had previously obtained the ‘Verpleegkundige A' nursing degree) she graduated in Rotterdam in 1975 and then went out into the world. "I wanted to know what midwifery was like outside the Netherlands. So I left for New Zealand and worked in a training hospital for midwives there for two years. It turned out that things work entirely different there from what we're used to here." This experience touched a deeper curiosity in Hennie: how is it possible that the same phenomenon is viewed and carried out so differently around the world? Back in the Netherlands, other questions, too, roused her curiosity, and so she decided to step into the world of research.

In the beginning, she did her research alongside her own thriving practice. It was hard work, and conducting research was purely piecemeal. Hennie developed her research competences as she went, first by joining other studies, then by formulating her own research questions, and finally by raising funds and bringing a research team together independently. This led to her PhD dissertation in 2005 and appointment as an AVMU lecturer in 2006. There, she hopes to pass the torch of inspiration, curiosity and research on to her students, and she is fully confident she will: "I see that the graduation presentations are becoming increasingly professional!"