Mary Kathleen Matthews
Biographical information
For her service to maternity and to the national and international community, Kay Matthews was awarded an honorary doctor of laws degree at the 10 a.m. session of spring convocation on May 25.
Ms. Matthews has a diploma in nursing from St. Anthony's Hospital Cheam in Surrey, England and a diploma in midwifery from General Lying-in Hospital in London. She received her bachelor of nursing and master of nursing from Memorial. While the natural childbirth movement was not new in 1970, it took the quiet persistence of Ms. Matthews to make it a possibility for women in Newfoundland and Labrador. Involving an effectively drug-free delivery, the process left both mother and child healthier. She began encouraging the use of this approach in her antenatal classes and later extended it further with breastfeeding support groups. She is a former faculty member at Memorial and was named honorary research professor in 2003. She is an honorary member of the Association of Registered Nurses of Newfoundland and Labrador.
Oration honouring Mary Kathleen Matthews, given by Jean Guthrie, University orator
Today we celebrate the leadership of Kay Matthews, until recently associate professor in Memorial's School of Nursing, whose pioneering work in maternal and child health is a vivid practical testament to the ethics of care.
Professional caring, as Kay Matthews models it, you graduates today know to be a difficult and tough-minded discipline, because it requires the best available knowledge and know-how (which you have been slaving to command); but also full attention to others, respect for vulnerability; and the imagination and courage to instigate change: all of these Kay Matthews has in abundance. She also excels, though she would never tell you, at bridge, important to know as you step out, because she firmly believes in recreation as balance; but especially because her caring is balanced, her wicked strategic sense of the cards others hold and how they'll play them always serving her great gifts of understanding and connection.
Kay Matthews arrived in St. John's in 1967 with her husband Keith, a historian: she had two babies, two diplomas (nursing and midwifery), two kinds of professional experience, and about two thousand good ideas for tackling a new situation. Observing a need, she started a vigorous cottage industry: coaching pregnant women in techniques which would give them control over labour and see their babies arrive healthy, alert, and not drunk on demerol. (The dads, attending with Kay's blessing, were the ones who needed the demerol.)
This family support Kay Matthews undertook at a time when interventions in birth and in lactation were almost automatic: mothers might not even be consulted or offered choices. So as well as a throng of grateful parents, Kay's outreach seeded change: before long she was making a career co-ordinating case rooms and nurseries.
Then from the Grace and St. Clare's to Memorial, where she educated the next generation of nurses to support women in labour and breast-feeding, winning awards for excellence as she went, and dedicating her own research to infant nutrition and women's reproductive health.
By now, though, the secret was out. Memorial had secured an expert with the vision and praxis needed for new international projects in parts of the world where mothers were still dying to give birth. In Indonesia, as project director, Kay built networks, that started conversations, that still spread outwards, from 25 nursing faculty and graduate students in Djakarta, to include the scores of nurses and para-professionals in villages, whose caring tends the future. Today, at Waru Jaya, there's a busy centre for birthing and education; the project has just been endorsed by government as the model for rural Indonesia; and Kay Matthews is Ibu Kay, the woman who made the difference.
She has made a difference too in Africa, working with MaterCare in Nigeria and Ghana since 1991. If birthing in Indonesia is compromised by poverty and malnutrition, in Africa it is compromised by gender: women often begin childbearing so early that the pelvis is not fully grown, labour is obstructed, babies die, and mothers, suffering obstetric fistula, become chronically incontinent, and are often abandoned.
Kay Matthews travelled to scattered villages to educate practitioners and mothers, fearless even in the midst of menace, in a broken-down car, on a mud road, in the season when men proclaim their dominance by mass marching, shouting and drumming, a story she tells, without heroics, as what you have to expect. Graduates in nursing and medicine, is there a conversation waiting to happen with the men of rural Africa, which your excellent education has prepared you to engage?
Mr. Vice-Chancellor, birth was said by the cynic Ambrose Bierce to be the first and direst of all life's disasters. Excuse him, for he had not met Ibu Kay, whose favourite poet is Gerard Manley Hopkins: "Not, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, feast on thee." Whatever the obstacles or terrors, Kay Matthews has played the cards of brilliant team-building and belief in activism for change, and has made seven no trump: averting despair, and bringing hope of birth, health and harvest.
For the contract she has honoured with the vulnerable of the earth, please confer the degree of doctor of laws, honoris causa, on Mary Kathleen Matthews.
Address to convocation
It is a great honour to be here today with you on your graduation and I have to admit to astonishment at giving the convocation address.
When I arrived in Newfoundland almost 40 years ago I could not have imagined the interesting, exciting career I was to pursue in nursing and the many and varied opportunities for professional development. The graduates here today have earned the right to practice medicine, computer engineering and nursing. However, all of you are facing issues unheard of 40 years ago. So, I would like to share some thoughts with you who are just embarking on your careers.
There has been a technological revolution in health care. More complex treatments require complex care. The new technologies have led to improved outcomes, but they are also associated with more adverse reactions and ethical dilemmas. The use of computer technology, both in the diagnostic technologies and for communication has provided tools to enable physicians make more accurate diagnoses, transfer data quickly from isolated outposts to specialist centers and make sophisticated treatment more available outside major centers. All of these technologies require broad and specific knowledge across the health-related disciplines and inter-professional collaboration to provide the best possible care for clients. Indeed the policy makers are beginning to demand collaboration and are establishing multi-disciplinary committees to determine how this can be achieved. However, true collaboration can only occur when each professional body has a strong sense of its professional autonomy and place within the system.
The evolution of nursing has been the evolution of a mainly female profession. Many early struggles were related to the inequality of women and inter-professional rivalry. The university-based nursing program achieved in Newfoundland and Labrador has been the result of strong leadership by the professional association, careful planning, better educational opportunities for women and above all true collaboration between five provincial schools of Nursing.
As a result, the nursing education system has been revolutionized. The first six baccalaureate nursing graduates in the class of 1966 could not have imagined that within 40 years all registered nurses would require a baccalaureate degree to practice and that postgraduate education at masters and doctoral levels would be well established. At today's convocation, degrees will be awarded to 132 new graduates of the baccalaureate program, and 23 graduates of the masters program, including two nurse practitioners. Several Memorial University nursing graduates are undertaking or have completed doctoral programs. What a difference this will make to the health care system.
Placing nursing programs within the university has increased the credibility of the profession, strengthened the political influence of nursing and provided the
health care system with nurses who have the potential to be leaders and agents for change.
The critical thinking skills developed through courses in the humanities, and social and biological sciences are needed more than ever by physicians and nurses within the complex health care system of this new century. This revolution in nursing education has brought with it opportunities, but with the opportunities have come responsibilities. The impact of the new medical technologies and nursing care strategies on patients and clients need to be evaluated on an on-going basis and clinical competence must be guided by the evidence from research. As well, we must make sure that patients and families have the information to make informed choices to keep healthy and to help themselves heal when they are ill. Above all, caring, the attribute central to nursing, is needed more than ever in this technological age.
The skills you have developed during your programs can be applied nationally and internationally. Faculty and students have been involved in projects in Nicaragua, Belize, Vietnam, Indonesia, Guatemala and Africa. Students have come to Memorial from Africa, Indonesia, Chile, Vietnam, Malaysia and many other countries. Today, especially, we congratulate the group of students from China who have completed the Masters in Applied Science. Their influence will be felt in their own country and throughout the world. Those of us fortunate enough to have been involved in the health care systems of less fortunate countries recognize the disparity in health care between rich and poor and the difficulties created for our professional colleagues in those countries by lack of resources. We value the health care system in Canada in which no mother dies in childbirth through lack of access to professional care, or an inability to pay.
Enjoy today, for the work starts tomorrow. With the research evidence as your armour, be radical. Do not accept the status quo. Always ask the question: How can this be done better? Be politically active in your professional associations and your unions and be knowledgeable about the issues involved in the delivery of health care. Above all, support and protect the Canada Health Act's core principles which are universal access to, and equality in, health care. These principles are under threat from certain political ideologies in Canada and by corporate interests, often from the South.
Today I have had the honour of receiving an honorary degree. However, no one achieves this on their own and as I look back on almost 50 years in nursing and midwifery, I realize I was privileged throughout my career to care for mothers and their families who influenced my approach to maternity care. I had excellent teachers, exemplary clinical and academic colleagues, supportive administrators and, above all, a patient and loving family. This honour is shared with all of them.