Application of innovations saves women from maternal deaths
The application of simple innovations in rural settings in Ghana is saving women from maternal deaths, Dr Gloria Quansah-Asare, Deputy Director-General of the Ghana Health Service (GHS), has said.
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According to her, there are a number of innovations that have proven to work, even in local settings, and can further be improvised to save lives.
Speaking at a session at Women Deliver 2016, currently ongoing at Copenhagen, Denmark, Dr Quansah-Asare said one in four maternal deaths in the country was due to post-partum haemorrhage (PPH) and that the GHS was committed to taking advantage of key partnerships that could help save lives.
“When we hear of the technology that can save lives, we move with it,” she stated, adding that the GHS was working with Path and the USAID to empower midwives to use the innovations to prevent maternal deaths.
Dr Quansah-Asare was contributing to a panel discussion on the topic ‘Scaling Innovations to save the lives of mothers and babies’, organised by Concern Worldwide, an international humanitarian and development organisation, the Philips Foundation, Grans Challenges, Canada, Path, MSD, the maternity Foundation and the United Nation’s Every Woman and Every Child Foundation.
Uterine Balloon Tamponade
An example of a life-saving innovation, she said, was the Uterine Balloon Tamponade (UBT), a device made from a balloon fitted with a catheter and used when a woman bleeds after childbirth because her womb would not contract on its own.
The UBT is inserted through the cervix into the womb, quickly inflated and left for between six and 24 hours during which it is deflated gradually.
Dr Quansah-Asare explained that when the specially developed “bakry” balloon was not available, the UBT could be improved by using a male condom and a catheter or an intravenous line.
She said the GHS and Path trained about 400 midwives, labour room nurses and doctors last year in the Greater Accra and Eastern regions to scale up the use of the UBT which had been available for about five years.
Since its introduction, there has been a significant reduction in maternal deaths due to PPH, Dr Quansah-Asare indicated, adding that the GHS was also promoting the use of misoprostol in rural settings where women found it very difficult to access skilled delivery to prevent deaths as a result of bleeding after childbirth.
Other innovations
Another innovation being implemented is the use of quality oxytocin, which is the drug of choice for controlling PPH and ensuring that the proper cold chain is maintained in order not to reduce its efficacy.
The Head of Philips Africa Innovation Hub, Dr Maarten van Herpen, also announced that the organisation had developed a simple device that could be used to treat pneumonia in children, even in rural areas where there was no electricity.
The Vice-President of Innovation and Strategy, Concern Worldwide, Pam Bolton, observed that “technological inventiveness has brought us to the brink of solving some of the most difficult health challenges in ways that we couldn’t have imagined even five years ago”.
In her brief remarks to open the discussions, Crown Princess Mary of Denmark noted that the existence of effective solutions could prevent maternal deaths and called for the scaling up of cost-effective innovative scalable solutions to save lives.
The CEO of Women Deliver, Katja Iversen, said innovations were key to the conference which was focusing on proven solutions for maternal health.
A Special Adviser on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and Climate Change of the United Nations, Dr David Nabarro, called for a continuous improvement on innovations for maternal health.