Society Moves To Reduce Deaths Among Expectant Mothers

The Society for Family Health (SFH) has carried out two-year project aimed at reducing illness and death among expectant mothers and infants.

The Managing Director of SFH, Mr. Bright Ekweremadu, made this known at a news conference in Abuja on Wednesday.

The project, which began in November 2009 and ended in December 2011, witnessed the training of 695 volunteer drivers in an Emergency Transport Scheme (ETS), to assist in emergency cases.

The training was done in collaboration with the National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW).

Part of the project also ensured the training of more than 315 Traditional Birth attendants (TBAs), on how to conduct clean and safe delivery of pregnant women.

The TBAs are also expected to identify danger signs, provide counseling and refer pregnant women and newborns in their local communities. Clean delivery kits were provided through Patent Proprietary Medicine Vendors (PPMVs).

A call centre was also established to provide toll free numbers to be called during emergencies on maternal and neonatal health care issues.

Ekweremadu said 11 local government areas of Gombe State were covered in the course of the project.

He quoted the National Demographic Health Survey 2008 as saying that only 17 percent of pregnant women delivered in such health facilities in the state.

The goal of the project was to demonstrate the effective, scalable approaches to improving critical maternal health practices in the home and position successful approaches for scale up.

“This implies that majority of the pregnant women deliver at home without the assistance of a skilled health care attendant. This practice has resulted in complications and of course needless deaths of mothers and the newborns.”

Ekweremadu disclosed that SHF, through the London-based Population Service International and Transaid, had carried out a project in Hausa with the theme: “Inganta Rayuwar Iyali.”

He said the project, funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, saw the training of 248 women volunteer by the Federation of Muslim Women’s Association of Nigeria (FOMWAN) in six LGAs in Gombe.

The managing director revealed that in the course of the project, a 20 percent increase in the number of women who attended antenatal care was recorded.

He said that there was also a 20 per cent increase in the use of clean delivery kits for home births.

According to Ekweremadu, three per cent of expectant mothers were conveyed to the health facilities by volunteer drivers while more than 80,000 calls with average of 5,500 calls per month were made at the call centres.

Also speaking, Mr Saul Morris, the Senior Programme Officer at the Child Health, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, said the project cost the establishment 6.7 million dollars.

He said the foundation might implement another phase of the project in other states.

He maintained that the experience gained from the current project, would assist the foundation in the implementation of similar projects in the future.

“The value that we invested in this first two years of this project was 6.7 million dollars, we’ve definitely tried in the first phase of the work to make sure that the kind of evaluation, monitoring and the rigorous supervision of all these volunteers and TBAs in the communities were receiving, was well about average.”