India: Community Partnerships for Safe Motherhood
Provided by PRIME II VOICES
“Before we elected our committee, the nurse-midwife would come,
take a walk around the village and leave. We did not know who
she vaccinated nor did we know how many women were pregnant.
Now we catch her and get our work done.”
Parvati, a mother of three in her 40s, is a member of the Village
Health Committee in Kakardehi, a community of 2,500 people
in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. On the first and
last Wednesday of every month, Kakardehi receives a visit from
Rama Nayar, an Auxiliary Nurse-Midwife charged with immunizing
pregnant women against tetanus. In the past, Parvati
says, Rama’s rounds usually took little more than half an hour,
during which time she inoculated three or four women.
One morning, as she prepared to leave Kakardehi, the newly
elected Village Health Committee staged a friendly encounter to
waylay Rama. The committee members asked how many
women she had immunized that day and were surprised to learn
that she had found only four. The committee had recently
conducted its own household survey and registered the names
of 45 women who were four to five months pregnant. After a
visit to Parvati’s house, where they kept their list, the committee
members accompanied Rama to all 45 homes. In the process,
they discovered four more pregnant women in need of tetanus
inoculations. Rama’s visit to Kakardehi that day lasted
four hours.
The Village Health Committees are a vital component of the
PRIME II Project’s Community Partnerships for Safe Motherhood
program to reduce maternal and neonatal mortality in
Uttar Pradesh. With Shramik Bharti, a local nongovernmental
organization, PRIME has helped to create 34 democratically
elected Village Health Committees serving 40 communities. In
addition to registering pregnant women and facilitating access
to nurse-midwives for prenatal care, the committees supervise
Village Health Guides who are teaching home-based life-saving
skills to hundreds of pregnant women and their caregivers
during 2001-2. With community input and involvement as its
driving force, the CPSM program also focuses on reducing delays in transportation to referral facilities and integrating family
planning and postabortion care with improved maternal
health services.
The partnership between the Village Health Committee and their
nurse-midwife provides Parvati with a sense of ownership in the
health care system and enables Rama to serve the community more
effectively. As a result, the chances for safe motherhood are actively
enhanced for the women of Kakardehi.
For more success stories, visit
Prime
II Voices.
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