Midwifery Professional Development Prioritizing Respectful Maternity Care to End Preventable Maternal and Newborn Deaths & Disabilities
To improve quality of maternal health services in health facilities, CSI offers midwifery professional development skills course using a country's nationally approved midwifery curriculum to address the chronic shortage of skilled midwives, knowledge gaps in best practices, lagging health system, and human rights violation of childbearing women which all contribute to high preventable/treatable maternal and neonatal deaths and disabilities.
The CSI midwifery skills course is intended to end obstetric violence, improve competency skills of licensed midwives, to ensure midwives' day-to-day duties align with current and best practices to recognize danger signs, how to manage or de-escalate them to save life of Mom and Baby, and to provide respectful maternity care across health facilities. Comprehensive safe motherhood is the primary goal of CSI's midwifery professional development program. The robust two-weeks training encompasses hands-on learning in Basic Emergency Obstetric and Newborn Care, Newborn Resuscitation and Care, Family Planning, Helping Mothers Survive & additional critical maternal-newborn care best practices by using modern technologies, information, learning materials and products.
CSI works closely with White Ribbon Alliance and partners including Laerdal Global Health to apply established maternal-newborn health guidelines and ensure Respectful Maternity Care (RMC) is implemented across health facilities especially in underserved communities in low- and middle-income countries where despite progress, major challenges contributing to preventable maternal-newborn deaths remain. CSI incorporates the WRA RMC Charter: the Universal Rights of Childbearing Women in training by applying the seven identified human rights areas in maternal health to holistically address safe motherhood. Follow up visits are made to various health facilities to ensure RMC is being practiced and reinforced to benefit mother-baby dyad.
Since 2014, CSI Tanzania has been working with midwives across health facilities in Dar es Salaam. In September 2016, under the leadership of Tanzania's midwifery guru - Mama Stella Mpanda, CSI rolled out Midwifery Professional Development in Tanzania, training licensed midwives to provide quality and respectful maternity care. Click here to read CSI Midwifery newsletter. Positive feedback was received and demand for more opportunities to improve midwifery skills and services was expressed.
