Reducing maternal and newborn deaths globally
2010-12-08
(Press-News.org) On Tuesday 7 December 2010, maternal health professionals from Africa and Asia will be attending a workshop in Liverpool to discuss the effects of 'Making It Happen', a programme with a life-saving training package for health care providers at its heart. Participants will share successes and lessons learned from this maternal and newborn health intervention, to better determine how the programme can be scaled-up.
Supported by the UK's Department for International Development (DFID), UNICEF and other bodies and in partnership with the Royal College of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists (RCOG), the Making It Happen programme is evaluating the effect of this intervention on reducing maternal and newborn mortality and morbidity in five countries - Kenya, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe, Bangladesh and India. Representatives from those countries, alongside DFID and RCOG will be visiting Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) to develop future strategies for reducing maternal and newborn deaths within those countries.
The availability and quality of Essential (Emergency) Obstetric and Newborn Care (EOC & NC) both demonstrably increased by delivering this country-adapted competency-based training package to healthcare providers of different cadres. Working together with many volunteer staff retired from or still working in the NHS, the Making it Happen programme is delivering a sustainable intervention by ensuring there are Master Trainers or Facilitators in each country as well as Supportive Supervisors who help implement changes within the workplace.
Since piloting the training package in 2007, almost 3000 health care providers have been trained through the LSTM team, leading to improved knowledge and skills that result in a better quality of clinical practice: notably improved care of women with eclampsia; better monitoring of labour; improved resuscitation of the baby; improved ability to deliver twins and breech presentations; improved management of haemorrhage and upskilling of, for example, midwives who are now able to perform procedures previously restricted to doctors.
Head of LSTM's Maternal and Newborn Health Unit and Principal Investigator Dr Nynke van den Broek said: "A renewed focus on supporting health care porviders of all levels to give truly Skilled Birth Attendance and manage obstetric emergencies correvtly is saving lives of both mothers and babies in each of the countries involved in the Making it Happen programme and ensures that this crucial health care is available to all women 24 hours a day."
Professor James Walker, Senior Vice-President of RCOG said: "The RCOG is proud to be part of this programme where so many of its Fellows and Members volunteer so readily. The training provided helps the local healthcare providers to increase both the capacity and sustainability of high level care where it is so desperately needed. The success of the programme is due to the combination of dedication of all the country partners, the willingness of the volunteers and the keenness of the participants."
###
For further information, please contact:
Billy Dean, Development Officer
Office: +44 (0)151 705 3272
Notes to Editors:
Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine
LSTM is a multi-disciplinary organisation concerned with research, teaching, technical assistance and clinical care in the fields of tropical and infectious diseases. Founded in 1898, LSTM has been at the forefront of the fight against infectious, debilitating and disabling diseases for more than a hundred years and continues that tradition today with a research portfolio in excess of £159 million and a teaching programme attracting students from over 70 countries.
www.lstmliverpool.ac.uk
Royal College of Obstetricians & Gynaecologists (RCOG)
The RCOG encourages the study and advancement of the science and practice of obstetrics and gynaecology. We do this through postgraduate medical education and training development, and the publication of clinical guidelines and reports on aspects of the specialty and service provision. The RCOG International Office works with other international organisations to help lower maternal morbidity and mortality in under-resourced countries.
www.rcog.org.uk
END
ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:
2010-12-08
ANN ARBOR, Mich. — In an era when social networking sites and blogs are visited by three quarters of online users, it's only natural that the medical profession would also tap into the power of social media tools.
Caroline Richardson, M.D., associate professor of family medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School, and her colleagues found that adding an interactive online community to an Internet-based walking program significantly decreased the number of participants who dropped out.
Seventy-nine percent of participants who used online forums to motivate ...
2010-12-08
When an antibiotic is consumed, researchers have learned that up to 90 percent passes through a body without metabolizing. This means the drugs can leave the body almost intact through normal bodily functions.
In the case of agricultural areas, excreted antibiotics can then enter stream and river environments through a variety of ways, including discharges from animal feeding operations, fish hatcheries, and nonpoint sources such as the flow from fields where manure or biosolids have been applied. Water filtered through wastewater treatment plants may also contain used ...
2010-12-08
Brussels, 7 December 2010 – Polar research must become an integral part of the European Union's research activities if Europe is to benefit from the dramatically changing face of the Polar Regions, the European Polar Board (EPB) said today at the launch of its strategic position paper on European polar research: "Relevance, Strategic Context and Setting Future Directions."
European research activities in the Polar Regions are significant, amounting to over 300 million euro per year in recognition of the regions' key role as driver of the Earth's climate and the functioning ...
2010-12-08
People who live in walkable communities are more civically involved and have greater levels of trust than those who live in less walkable neighborhoods. And this increase in so-called 'social capital' is associated with higher quality of life, according to Shannon Rogers and her team from the University of New Hampshire in the US. Their research, looking at the social benefits of walkability in communities, is published online in Springer's journal Applied Research in Quality of Life.
A walkable community provides residents with easy access to post offices, town parks ...
2010-12-08
Tel Aviv ― Career women who put babies on hold until after 40, or even 45, will be reassured by new research from Tel Aviv University. Even though there are associated risks for babies when postponing child-bearing, the neonates can overcome them, says Prof. Yariv Yogev of Tel Aviv University's Sackler School of Medicine and the Hospital for Women at Rabin Medical Center.
Working as a clinician in Israel, a country that supports in vitro fertilization (IVF) in older women, Prof. Yogev and his colleagues investigated the outcomes for mothers of 45 or more and their ...
2010-12-08
7 December 2010 – We commonly think of sleep as a healing process that melts away the stresses of the day, preparing us to deal with new challenges. Research has also shown that sleep plays a crucial role in the development of memories.
An important component of anxiety disorders, including posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), is the formulation of memories associated with fear.
Therefore, researchers decided to evaluate whether sleep deprivation after exposure to an aversive event might eliminate the associated fear, due to the lack of memory consolidation that would ...
2010-12-08
BOSTON (December 7, 2010) —Newly-created bioactive peptides promote wound healing through the growth of new blood vessels and epithelial tissue, such as skin. These wound-healing peptides, synthesized by researchers at the Tufts Center for Innovations in Wound Healing Research, increased angiogenesis in vitro by 200 percent. The discovery, reported online in advance of print this week in Wound Repair and Regeneration, provides a better understanding of the mechanisms regulating wound healing and may lead to new therapies for acute and chronic wound healing.
"We identified ...
2010-12-08
AUSTIN, Texas—The role a key molecule plays in a plant's ability to remember winter, and therefore bloom in the spring, has been identified by University of Texas at Austin scientists.
Many flowering plants bloom in bursts of color in spring after long periods of cold in the winter. The timing of blooming is critical to ensure pollination, and is important for crop production and for droves of people peeping at wildflowers.
One way for the plants to recognize the spring—and not just a warm spell during winter—is that they "remember" they've gone through a long enough ...
2010-12-08
When two individuals face off in conflict, the classic problem in evolutionary biology known as the prisoner's dilemma says that the individuals are not likely to cooperate even if it is in their best interests to do so. But a new study suggests that with incentives to cooperate, natural selection can minimize conflict, changing the game from one of pure conflict to one of partial cooperation.
The findings, published online in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, suggest that the prisoner's dilemma game, which has reigned as the dominant theoretical paradigm used to ...
2010-12-08
MAYWOOD, Ill. -- A new technique that jumpstarts the growth of nerve fibers could reverse much of the damage caused by strokes, researchers report in the Jan. 7, 2011 issue of the journal Stroke.
"This therapy may be used to restore function even when it's given long after ischemic brain damage has occurred," senior author Gwendolyn Kartje, MD, PhD and colleagues write.
The article has been published online in advance of the print edition of Stroke.
Kartje is director of the Neuroscience Institute of Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine and chief of ...
LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:
[Press-News.org] Reducing maternal and newborn deaths globally
