She joined KK to seek answers on stillborn sibling, and stayed for 50 years as a midwife

More than five decades ago, a woman’s curiosity about why her sibling had been stillborn led her to enrol in Kandang Kerbau Hospital’s school of midwifery.

- Ng Keng Gene

Today, having worked at the hospital for about 53 years, Ms Saleha Kamsan, 72, a staff midwife at what is now KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital, said the satisfaction of seeing families leave the hospital with their newborn children kept her in the profession.

Ms Saleha was among the hospital’s longtime staff who recounted their memories of the former Kandang Kerbau Hospital in Hampshire Road to the media on Oct 1— the day three blocks of the old hospital were collectively gazetted as Singapore’s 76th national monument.

The hospital moved to its present site in Kampong Java in 1997.

When Ms Saleha ~ the second of six siblings - was a Secondary 4 student, her mother, after experiencing excessive bleeding, was admitted to the hospital to deliver what would have been her seventh child.

This was an anomaly, said Ms Saleha, as she and her five siblings were born at home.

While training to be a midwife from 1972 to 1975, Ms Saleha came to understand that her sixth sibling was lost because her mother’s placenta was in an unnatural position.

She found the answer to what she had been looking for, but Ms Saleha learnt a lot more than that.