Do Rwandans still need to travel abroad for child birth?

Photo: Newtimes

Rwanda has reduced both under-five mortality and maternal mortality by approximately three-quarters. This achievement has been attributed to improved maternal health care over the years. But despite this milestone, some women still prefer to travel out of the country to give birth.

Melisa Agasaro (not real name) delivered her first baby at a hospital in Australia and her second born in the US. Agasaro had a reason for choosing to travel far to give birth. She was diagnosed with a potentially life-threatening health condition, gestational diabetes, that couldn’t easily be dealt with in the country.

“I travelled to the US to have my second born in 2013, my pregnancy was a little bit complicated and the doctors here couldn’t trace the issue. When I went to the US, I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes, they also checked other complications but the condition was at a dangerous stage, so I was put on medication immediately,” the mother-of-two narrates.

She says she got outstanding care while in America.

Agasaro is just one of the many women who decide to have their babies abroad for various reasons. Some expecting women travel to give birth abroad as a matter of choice while others have no option since their condition cannot be managed locally.

For Lillian Mugabo, some women actually go abroad to give birth because of the way some local hospitals treat expectant mothers.

Referring to her experience, the mother of two supports women who choose to go abroad because she wouldn’t wish for any other woman to experience what she went through.

Mugabo had her second child two months ago, but the pain she experienced made her doubt the nurses who attended to her, and she wondered if they were skilled enough.

Vestine Uwamahoro echoes similar sentiments. She says that the process of giving birth is agonising enough and that a woman in labour deserves the best care from anywhere she believes she can get it.

“I wouldn’t say our system is bad, but I think those who go to other countries in most cases are seeking special care from more qualified doctors,” she says. 

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News credit : The NewTimes

News: Zimbabwe: '20 Percent Zim Women Give Birth At Home'

About 20 percent of Zimbabwean births over the past five years occurred at home, statistics which experts have described as unacceptably high.

According to the recently-released Zimbabwe Demographic Health Survey (ZDHS), institutional deliveries stood at an average of 77 percent.

"Seventy-seven percent of live births in the five years before the survey took place in a health facility, while 20 percent were delivered at home. Most institutional deliveries took place at public sector health facilities," reads the report.

"In Zimbabwe, institutional deliveries declined from 72 percent in 1999, to 68 percent in 2005-06, and 65 percent in 2010-11, and then substantially increased to 77 percent in 2015.

"Over the same period, home deliveries increased from 23 percent in 1999, to 31 percent in 2005-06, and 34 percent in 2011-10, and then decreased notably to 20 percent in 2015."

The report shows that Bulawayo and Harare provinces had the most institutional births at about 91 percent. Midlands, Matabeleland South and Matabeleland North had high percentages ranging from 81 to 85 percent.

"Masvingo and Mashonaland East had institutional deliveries ranging from 71- 80 percent. Mashonaland West, Mashonaland Central and Manicaland recorded the least institutional births, ranging from 66 to 70 percent."

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News credit : AllAfrica

Caring About Women’s Work: Why Sexual and Reproductive Rights Matter

The sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR) of women and girls are too often sidelined from key policy debates on women’s rights: dismissed as controversial and separate to discussions on women’s economic and political lives. Decision-makers and politicians silo different aspects of women and girls’ lives in policy initiatives, neatly separating rights related to bodily autonomy from workplace rights in ways that are neither realistic nor helpful.

The lives of women and girls are complex, varied and intersectional. SRHR cuts across every aspect of women and girls’ lives, both enabling and limiting life opportunities. The freedom to decide if and when we marry and have children, to live free from violence, and to make decisions regarding our bodies are key to empowering women economically.

Despite this trend, it is important to look behind the numbers, and assess the extent to which women's work is empowering. ‘Women’s economic empowerment’ is a term that has come to mean everything and nothing in policy terms, not only because the concept of ‘empowerment’ is so difficult to measure. Rather than view women’s economic empowerment solely within the prism of economic growth, we must unpack the complex systems that uphold women’s inequality, and avoid falling into the trap of assuming women’s formal labour force participation and contribution to the market economy is necessarily empowering. We must instead look at how our current economic models uphold women’s inequality and identify where women work and why they work, as well as the quality of their working conditions.

Women’s work

Much of women’s work remains hidden and unpaid. A major reason for this is that women around the world are disproportionately responsible for undertaking care work. Care work is mostly unpaid labour undertaken by women and girls such as child care, elder care, taking care of ill family members, cooking and cleaning.  The ‘care economy’, which includes paid and unpaid care work and is primarily undertaken by women and girls, and has an impact on their life opportunities outside of the home. Continue here to read more

News credit: Womendeliver

News: A garment originally made for astronauts is saving the lives of new mothers in developing countries

In 1969, medical researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Center were referred an unusual patient: a local California woman who had given birth to a healthy baby, but who kept hemorrhaging dangerous amounts of blood.

While doctors at Stanford University Hospital gave the hemorrhage patient a blood transfusion, engineers at the space agency brainstormed solutions to stop the bleeding. They decided to try an anti-gravity suit—typically used to keep astronauts from blacking out during extreme acceleration by squeezing the arms and legs to push blood back towards the head—to apply external pressure to the woman’s lower body and drive blood upward. It was a success, and the woman’s life was saved.

Soon after, a version of the suit was created for battlefield injuries affecting the lower body. The half-suit was applied as an emergency rescue measure to stabilize soldiers suffering from shock.

In 2001, Stanford obstetrician Paul Hensleigh tested the garment, but with elastic compression instead of a pneumatic pressure, in a hospital setting: he was able to save the lives of 13 out of 14 patients in shock from extreme blood loss in a facility in Pakistan.

Taking inspiration from NASA and Hensleigh’s research, Suellen Miller, the founder of University of California San Francisco’s Safe Motherhood Program, set out to adapt the technology to treat new mothers who slip into shock due to excessive bleeding. It’s a particular problem in the developing world, where postpartum hemorrhage (PPH)—loss of more than 500 milliliters of blood after the birth of a baby—accounts for up to 60% of maternal mortality cases. Continue here to read more

News credit : Quartz

Uganda: Setting of Consultation Fees Is Not Solution to Unaffordable Healthcare

Whiteribbonalliance.org

The medical council as per Daily Monitor of January 9 proposed to set doctors' consultation fees in a bid to address the issue of patients being detained or denied services because of inability to pay medical bills. The medical council is getting it wrong with this preposition on three accounts that is; this doesn't address the root cause of patients' inability to reimburse for medical services, secondly will make the business environment for healthcare anti-competitive and finally drive more high quality doctors out of medical practice in Uganda.

The first question that should have been asked is why are people unable to afford healthcare? While the answer to this might be multi-dimensional, the simplest answer is that no one plans on being sick and therefore no one saves up for that unanticipated event. For this reason, most countries have developed and implemented mechanisms to ensure that hospitals and health professionals are reimbursed for services rendered mostly through their national health insurance systems or mandating individuals to purchase health insurance. The medical council instead of adopting extreme paternalistic remedies that make Uganda's private health system less competitive should address the root cause of affordability of healthcare to Ugandans. Continue here to read more

News credit: Allafrica