Stipendberetning Bich Truong

A research stay at the MotherSafe Clinic in Sydney, Australia

I had the great pleasure of spending three months at the MotherSafe Clinic, Royal Hospital for Women in Sydney, Australia, with my fellow PhD student Elin Ngo.

The MotherSafe Clinic provides counseling for pregnant women and their healthcare providers about medications and other exposures during pregnancy. The clinic is located at the Royal Hospital for Women in the state of New South Wales and covers about 100,000 deliveries annually. The purposes of this stay were for us to learn from an internationally recognized group with extensive experience in the challenging field of teratology, and to test our novel mobile application, “MySafeStart”, on an English-speaking population.

Even though our project did not go according to plan, we got valuable experiences on how to meet and communicate with pregnant women about the use of medications during pregnancy. We got to observe the telephone consultations as well as the in-person consultations at the clinic. I am very grateful and humbled to get the opportunity to work under Dr. Debra Kennedy’s guidance and to get her expertise on how we can further develop the SafeStart project here in Norway.

I want to thank the Norwegian Pharmaceutical Society for allowing me to travel Down Under and spend three months at the MotherSafe Clinic. The stay has given me new insights that will be very valuable for my PhD project.