By Mike Adeyemi
Wellbeing Foundation Africa, a Non Governmental Organization (NGO), said it has trained about 800 health workers in emergency obstetrics care in Kwara State.
The Senior Technical Officer, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, Dr. Hawwa Mohammed stated this Monday during a dissemination meeting on ‘scaling up intervention to improve quality of care for mother and newborn in Kwara State held at Noktel Hotel, Ilorin, the Kwara State capital.
According to the physician, “For the past five years, we have been working with the Kwara State Government with the support from Well-being Foundation to implement training in emergency obstetrics care and quality improvement”.
“The whole aim of this project is to improve the quality of services that we provide for our mothers and new born in facility.
“So far we have worked with over 50 facilities where we trained their health workers in Kwara. We have trained 800 health workers in emergency obstetrics care.
“We have also trained some in quality improvement and we set up emergency obstetrics care in 16 health care facilities,” Mohammed said.
She added that what her team does is a thorough baseline monitoring and evaluation of the health facility in every three months.
“What we do is monitoring and evaluation of the health facility. So when we came in initially, we do a baseline to show what is on ground and then we give them series of training and we will come back every three months to re evaluate them. The evaluation is in form of supportive supervision perhaps they have any problem.
“Maternal mortality rate is very bad all over Nigeria. The statistics is bad in which Kwara State is not exempted. I think right now there are about 774 public health facility in Kwara and we followed up 48.
“And apart from that women still died in the village. Most of them attended antenatal care, but less down 10 per cent will still deliver at traditional heath attendant.
“There is an improvement, but we still need to educate our people. Maternal mortality rate in Kwara is still high and we have a lot of work to do if we want to achieve SDG by 2030,” she stressed.
In the same vein, the National Program coordinator for Wellbeing Foundation, Dr. Otun Adewale said the target of the foundation is to enhance the capability of health care workers in Kwara state so as to see to decline in maternal mortality rate.
“This is a program that started about five years ago and it is called ’emergency obstetrics care,” organized by Wellbeing Foundation Africa.
“It is targeted at enhancing the capability of health care workers in Kwara state to see to reduction of maternal mobility. So what is missing essentially is that if you trained health workers that are managing mothers and babies and give them the required skills, they are likely to deliver better.
He further added that the event is a roundup of all the activities of the foundation in over five years.
“What we are doing today is just like a close out of the program that has been on for over five years. The program has achieved 30 per cent reduction in maternal mortality.
“We have also trained up to 800 health workers. The ripple effect of it is that they will go back to their facility and train more people on this.
“Also the program has donated 10 skilled lapse for hospitals in Kwara state whereby there will be knowledge retention, hospital management board can train and retrain new staff. In this way, you are sure of a long term effect in reduction of maternal mortality in Kwara state,” the medical practitioner noted.
He however advised that it is high time states across Nigeria key into project like this in a time where there is gross brain drain in the health sector of the country.
“I know this kind of program is in the curriculum for LSs in federal ministry of health, but nothing has been done so far because of lack of funding.
“This kind of program is something other state should key into especially at a time there is brain drain of health workers in Nigeria. Government should key into it and invest more into training of their health workers,” he stressed.
