Dr Bergman graduated at the University of Cape Town, and has worked in South Africa, Ciskei and, Sweden, before working seven years as Medical Superintendent and District Medical Officer at Manama Mission, Zimbabwe. Here he, together with Midwife Agneta Jurisoo, developed and implemented Kangaroo Mother Care (KMC) for premature infants right from birth. This resulted in a five-fold improvement in survival of Very Low Birth Weight babies. He introduced KMC to South Africa in 1995, and after 5 years, KMC became official policy for care of prematures in the hospitals of the Western Cape province. He has given keynote addresses on KMC at International Conferences in six continents, and published articles on a variety of subjects in medical journals. He now researches and promotes KMC fulltime. He was for 6 years Senior Medical Superintendent of the Mowbray Maternity Hospital (7000 deliveries per year) and five Midwife Obstetric Units (11000 deliveries per year). Since 2005 Dr Bergman has been promoting KMC globally, as a Consulting Public Health Physician. He contributed to initiating the Gates funded WHO Immediate KMC Study, and was a Principal Investigator in the WHO Study group that conducted this RCT, published in May 2021. He has developed and published the underlying scientific rationale that explains the very unexpected findings of profoundly lowered mortality from immediate and continuous skin-to-skin contact to very low birth weight newborns, summarized as “nurturescience” with Zero Separation of mother and newborn.
Apart from his original degree, he holds a Diploma in Child Health, a Masters degree in Public Health, and a Doctoral degree in Clinical Pharmacology, on the effects of scorpion stings. He currently lives in Stockholm, Sweden, where he is also a Research Associate at the Karolinska Institute, Sweden. He is married to Jill, and father to Rebecka, Simon and Emma, and has four grandchildren.