Dr Kamalini Lokuge has inspired an International Women's Day audience with stories of her work delivering health care in crisis situations.

Dr Lokuge, a Research Fellow at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health, has been involved with Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) for 20 years.

She has been part of field responses and monitoring of health care issues facing women and children in complex settings and conflict zones including Afghanistan.

"I arrived in Kabul a couple of weeks after the Taliban took over the city. I'd been a doctor for a few years, but never worked overseas so you can imagine, I faced that first mission with some trepidation," Dr Lokuge told the breakfast at The John Curtin School of Medical Research.

"I did things like negotiating with a Taliban governor so we could employ female staff in our most remote clinic. He refused to meet with me face to face, so I had to talk to him through a window.

"Three weeks later, after much cross window discussion, he announced that the Koran decreed woman had an equal right to healthcare, and I was allowed to employ women.

"Working in Afghanistan or similar settings, has given me an understanding of the value of healthcare but also the challenges faced."

Dr Lokuge has worked on Ebola outbreaks for the past 10 years, and was sent on a joint ANU MSF secondment to Guinea at the start of the outbreak, then onto Sierra Leone in 2014 at the peak of the outbreak there.

"In my first week in Sierra Leone, I was doing triage and contact tracing, which allowed me as an epidemiologist to understand the context of transmission in the community's patients were coming from," she said.

Dr Lokuge's work at ANU at aims to conduct research in partnership with health workers and their patients in complex, low resource emergencies.

"I returned to ANU a few years ago after I'd decided that I wanted to try to use what I had learnt about providing effective health services to help not just individual patients, but to make a difference more broadly," she said.

"By linking this work to that of epidemiologists, statisticians, policy analysts, disease modellers and economists at ANU, we contribute to addressing the many challenges facing those who live and work in these places."

Hear Kamalini's inspiring story.