This year Kybele celebrates its 20th anniversary!
While teaching as a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey in 1997, Dr. Medge Owen began piecing together a vision. Four years later, that vision took tangible shape when Kybele was formed and began to make a positive impact on birth experiences and outcomes for women and babies across the globe. From our humble beginnings, it is amazing to see how much we have grown over the past 20 years!
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Listen to recent podcast
with Dr.Owen.
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As we move forward into the next 20 years, we are grateful to all who have been part of this incredible journey. We know that our work allows more women and babies to survive by improving outcomes, in addition to being highly cost-effective. By working side by side with local medical providers and administrators in our host countries, we impart a model that is trusted, sustainable, and scalable.
We invite you to follow Kybele Worldwide on social media throughout the year as we highlight the stories of Kybele’s volunteers, donors, and — most importantly — beneficiaries.
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Read Kybele's most
recent publications.
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In honor of our 20th Anniversary year, Kybele has created a series of video interviews about Kybele's work. This video was shot and edited by Kybele Media Consultant Dayne Logan and features Kybele staff members, Kimber Whanger and Erin Pfeiffer.
Copyright © 2021 Kybele, Inc.
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Kybele Welcomes New Board Members |
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At Kybele, our mission is to create healthcare partnerships across borders to improve childbirth outcomes for women and babies. To do this successfully, we work side by side with medical colleagues in our host countries to understand their unique challenges. By listening and learning from them, we are then able to form shared plans around process improvements or education needs that work within their existing frameworks.
With this collegial relationship in mind, we are excited to welcome four new board members representing our programs in the Balkans, Ghana, and Ukraine.
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Oleg Turkot, MD, attended medical school in Ternopil, Ukraine, before coming to the U.S. to complete his residency in anesthesiology at SUNY in Brooklyn and fellowship in obstetric anesthesiology at Johns Hopkins Medical Center, where he is now a faculty member. Turkot has been a Kybele co-leader for our Ukraine program since 2018. He is a passionate advocate for improving access and minimizing costs of basic medical equipment in low-resource areas.
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Martin Boamah, MD, is the senior specialist obstetrician gynecologist for Greater Accra Regional Hospital in Accra, Ghana. He has been a host, advocate, and partner for Kybele for many years and has played a key role in the implementation and success of the Saving Lives at Birth program. He is the National Physician Champion for the Obstetric Triage Implementation Program, which provides quality-improvement training across eight medical facilities in Ghana.
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Gillian Abir, MD, MBChB, FRCA is a Clinical Associate Professor and Clinical Director for obstetric anesthesiology in the Department of Anesthesiology at Stanford University School of Medicine. She is originally from the UK, and graduated in the UK prior to her move to the US. Dr. Abir is the residency program director for obstetric anesthesiology, the lead anesthesiologist on the multidisciplinary obstetric simulation team and obstetric disaster preparedness team at Stanford, and serves on national committees that include SOAP (patient safety, international outreach, simulation subcommittee) and the CMQCC (maternal sepsis toolkit). She has a keen interest in global health and has been involved with Kybele since 2012 with several trips to Armenia, Serbia, and Bosnia.
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Nathaniel Tighe, MD, is an anesthesiologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and a faculty member at Harvard University. As both a professional choral singer and trumpet player, Dr. Tighe came to medicine from music. He first participated in a Kybele trip to Ghana in 2018 and returned in 2019 to co-direct a preparation course for the pediatric intensive care unit at Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra, Ghana.
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We are honored that these new members have committed time and energy to the work of Kybele, and we are grateful for their expertise. Welcome!
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Remembering Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. |
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“Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.” This was the declaration of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., at the Convention of the Medical Committee for Human Rights held in Chicago in March of 1966.
At Kybele, we could not agree more. Every day these inequities are made apparent by the far greater mortality rate of women and babies of color and those in low-resource countries.
This week, Kybele celebrates the legacy and leadership of Dr. King. At a time when the divisions he fought so hard to rectify are still sadly present, we hope that the torch he passed on to us can shed a light on these issues and guide us toward solutions.
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Copyright © 2021 Kybele, Inc. | 116 Lowes Foods Drive #170 - Lewisville, NC 27023 | 336.549.0774
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