Many Maternal, Infant Deaths Preventable Using Low-Tech Methods

Nigeria ranks amongst the country with the highest mortality rate in the world. It is no surprise we are the second largest in the whole world. That’s like a plane load of women crashing daily.
The unfortunate thing is that maternal death has touched every Nigerian in one way or the other. It could be as close as one’s wife, mother, aunty or cousin. It could be your employee’s relation, members in the same community, or place of worship. It could be said that chances are if you’re a Nigerian, you’re four people away from someone that died of child birth at one time or the other.

In 2000, at the Millennium Summit held in New York, World Leaders pledged to child mortality and improve maternal health among other goals (Millennium Development Goals) to ensure human development by the year 2015.Since the millennium declaration, Nigeria and many other countries are not on track to attaining the targets for reducing child mortality and improving maternal health.

There are effective interventions to significantly reduce child mortality and improve maternal mortality. The problem is that they are not delivered to the populations in need at high enough coverage (e.g., 80% immunization coverage.

. Efforts have largely fragmented and have not taken into good account the interdependency of the different stages of life. For instance, what we fail to give to a mother today in terms of healthcare, could affect the baby yet to be born and may have intergenerational effect that accrue to affect the child in school and his/her ability to attain the fulle4st potentials for development.

The situation calls for a new approach to doing business in health to improve the health of mothers, newborns and older children. Thus, the development of Advocacy for Maternal and Infant Health in Nigeria – AMIHIN; whose primary aim is in bringing awareness and support to reduce Maternal and Infant deaths by promoting the best interests of children and their mothers and seeking to influence government policy through advocacy.

A lot of issues are militating against the rapid reduction of maternal death in Nigeria. But we can start with the most simple and basic rules like:

1. Awareness: with awareness comes knowledge to the pregnant woman; what they know can be what may save their life. Where the people are aware of the need/urgency in ensuring a pregnant mother gets to the hospital early for proper medical attention.

2. Advocacy and intervention: Which is what we, and all others are doing but the government and stakeholders still need to take the end of the stick by intervening through availability of the basic infrastructures, man power and funds (with proper disbursement) to the basic and most important joints that is necessary for the smooth running of the program. Then we can move on to the others.

3. Training/re-training more midwives: more people should be encouraged to train as midwives in different communities; these people are ones that are usually on hand to determine the survival of the mother and child.

Most communities have their midwives/birth attendant who has been helping women during delivery and the people are comfortable with them. It has been discovered it is much better to re-train these midwives in the proper, safer and more proven methods of birth delivery; and what to do at the first signs of complications setting in.

Training and re-training midwifes in communities is a cheaper, safer and more cost effective way of ensuring pregnant mothers get adequate care and attention when most needed.
Under the new plan, the Bank will help with high maternal death and fertility rate to improve their reproductive health systems by ensuring that women have access to modern contraceptives and the ability to plan their families.

The organization will also focus on identifying gaps in the availability of health workers skilled in midwifery as well as doctors with obstetric skills.
This is because the absence of a skilled attendant at birth has been one of the top contributors of maternal deaths.

The University of North Carolina, School of Medicine conducted a study that shows that by training local birth attendants in a method promoted by the World Health Organization, the number of still births was reduced by about 30 percent.

Every woman should have access to care in a health facility where there is (are) personnel that are skilled and can provide the care she needs and the baby needs.
The interventions can be as simple as keeping the newborn warm. Or by making sure pregnant women have enough nourishing food to eat.

That will reduce the number of underweight babies that are born.
The important part is that these treatments and interventions need to be provided as a continuum. Starting from before the woman becomes pregnant, during the delivery, during the birth and continuing until the child is five years and older. (To be Contd....)