Making it Happen programme saving lives
The UK’s Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine (LSTM) says it is impressed by the work that Malawi is doing to reduce maternal and newborn deaths through the Making it Happen programme being implemented with funding from the Department for International Development (DfID).
Head of the LSTM Maternal and Newborn Health Unit, Professor Nynke van den Broek, who is visiting Malawi this week, says Making it Happen helps reduce maternal and newborn deaths and illnesses by increasing the availability and improving the quality of essential emergency obstetric and newborn care.
In an interview on Sunday, Van den Broek said there has been notable involvement of the four districts of Mwanza, Mangochi, Mulanje and Neno since the programme was introduced in July last year. Blantyre is planned to be included from 2014.
“We are working with existing health structures to make them more functional,” she said.
Through the programme, health workers are trained in emergency or essential obstetric and newborn care. So far, 90 health workers have been trained and about 400 are expected to be trained by 2015, when the programme winds up.
Van den Broek also commended government’s interest in reducing maternal and newborn deaths through the Safe Motherhood Initiative, saying it has contributed to the success of the programme.
“Government allocated to us the four districts and we are soon going to extend to Blantyre District. But we owe much of the success of this programme to the support that we are getting from the Reproductive Health Unit of the Ministry of Health, district health officers and Safe Motherhood coordinators, who have been working with us from the start,” she said.
An obstetrician/gynaecologist by profession, Van den Broek has worked in several developing countries, including at Malawi’s Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre from 1995 to 2000.
