In this bonus episode, we speak to Kim Holden, whose change of careers has been unconventional and courageous at the same time. She was a founder, managing principal and architect at the renowned SHoP Architects and decided to become a doula after 20 years of practice. We speak to Kim about her initiative Doula x Design and how she helps people during pregnancy, labor, birth and postpartum.

Kim is a registered architect and certified doula focused on the intersection of design and women’s health. Through the examination of the role that environment plays in the physical, physiological, and psychological experience of birth, Kim seeks to create awareness, improve outcomes, and to reframe childbirth as a societal topic, rather than as a women’s issue.

Kim’s website: https://doulaxdesign.com

Image credits: Kate Randall and Adventure to Motherhood: The Picture Story of Pregnancy and Childbirth, J. Allan Offen, MD, 1960

For our final episode for this season, we speak to doctor and architect Diana Anderson, who has skillfully carved a unique career path for herself as a “dochitect” – by pioneering a collaborative, evidence-based model for approaching healthcare from the medicine and architecture fields simultaneously.

Dr. Diana Anderson is a triple boarded professional – healthcare architect, internist, and a geriatrician. She is an Assistant Professor of Neurology at Boston University, and a recipient of an Alzheimer's Association Clinician Scientist Fellowship. She is also a healthcare principal at Jacobs, contributing her thought leadership at the intersection of design and health.

Diana’s website: www.dochitect.com

In our previous episode, we got an overview of medical tourism around the world and the key factors that drive people to travel from one country to another for medical treatments and procedures. Today, we take a closer look at some of the medical tourism hubs along a very specific geographic area, i.e., the US-Mexico border. 

Viviane Clement is an epidemiologist and a cultural Anthropologist whose research focuses on the macro and micro effects of health and environmental policies and politics on under-sourced and under-researched communities. For her article on medical tourism titled ‘In Search of Health: Medical Tourism at the US-Mexico Border/Lands’, she collaborated with Emma Newsome and Dr. Sergio Lemus to apply transborder theory and virtual ethnographies to analyze the variation in access to health care for populations who share the US-Mexico border/lands.