Southern Ethiopia - Gwent Health Link

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Midwifery Skills Training

Maternal care in Ethiopia

Maternal mortality rate in Ethiopia is 871 women per 100,000 live births. It is one of the highest in the world. 1 in 14 women will die from pregnancy related complications. There are only a handful of hospitals and less than 55% of the population has access to any kind of medical care. The majority of women,therefore, give birth at home with no qualified medical care. Less than 10% have any kind of antenatal care during pregnancy and less than 5% have any postnatal care after delivery. Women who have any care during their delivery, are mostly attended by traditional birth attendants. If they do manage to attend one of the health centres, which are usually more than 5-10km from home, they may be lucky enough to be taken care of by a nurse. However, these nurses themselves often would have had inadequate skills training and even lesser clinical experience. Moreover, there are no doctors and often no health officers in these health centres.

Our Role

Following needs assessment during previous visits, we organised a pilot skills training programme in March 2006 for midwives working in health centres and local hospital around Hwassa. This programme was very successful and practical skills training in emergency obstetrics was considered to be extremely valuable. We have therefore planned to arrange a larger workshop for skills training in October 2006. All midwives working in teaching health centres and district hospitals in Southern Ethiopia will be invited to a 5 day skills workshop. All the participants are expected to train atleast two other nurses in their own place of work, thus cascading our efforts onto a much larger number of health providers.