Unsafe abortion's significant contribution to maternal mortality and morbidity was a critical factor leading to liberalization of Nepal's restrictive abortion law in 2002. Careful, comprehensive planning among a range of multisectoral stakeholders, led by Nepal's Ministry of Health and Population, enabled the country subsequently to introduce and scale up safe abortion services in a remarkably short timeframe. This paper examines factors that contributed to rapid, successful implementation of legal abortion in this mountainous republic, including deliberate attention to the key areas of policy, health system capacity, equipment and supplies, and information dissemination. Important elements of this successful model of scaling up safe legal abortion include: the pre-existence of postabortion care services, through which health-care providers were already familiar with the main clinical technique for safe abortion; government leadership in coordinating complementary contributions from a wide range of public- and private-sector actors; reliance on public-health evidence in formulating policies governing abortion provision, which led to the embrace of medical abortion and authorization of midlevel providers as key strategies for decentralizing care; and integration of abortion care into existing Safe Motherhood and the broader health system. While challenges remain in ensuring that all Nepali women can readily exercise their legal right to early pregnancy termination, the national safe abortion program has already yielded strong positive results. Nepal's experience making high-quality abortion care widely accessible in a short period of time offers important lessons for other countries seeking to reduce maternal mortality and morbidity from unsafe abortion and to achieve Millennium Development Goals.
BackgroundEvidence-based medicines, technologies, and protocols exist to prevent many of the annual 300,000 maternal, 2.7 million neonatal, and 9 million child deaths, but they are not being effectively implemented and utilized in rural areas. Nepal, one of South Asia’s poorest countries with over 80% of its population living in rural areas, exemplifies this challenge. Community health workers are an important cadre in low-income countries where human resources for health and health care infrastructure are limited. As local women, they are uniquely positioned to understand and successfully navigate barriers to health care access. Recent case studies of large community health worker programs have highlighted the importance of training, both initial and ongoing, and accountability through structured management, salaries, and ongoing monitoring and evaluation. A gap in the evidence regarding whether such community health worker systems can change health outcomes, as well as be sustainably adopted at scale, remains. In this study, we plan to evaluate a community health worker system delivering an evidence-based integrated reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health intervention as it is scaled up in rural Nepal.MethodsWe will conduct a type 2 hybrid effectiveness-implementation study to test both the effect of an integrated reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health intervention and the implementation process via a professional community health worker system. The intervention integrates five evidence-based approaches: (1) home-based antenatal care and post-natal care counseling and care coordination; (2) continuous surveillance of all reproductive age women, pregnancies, and children under age 2 years via a mobile application; (3) Community-Based Integrated Management of Newborn and Childhood Illness; (4) group antenatal and postnatal care; and 5) the Balanced Counseling Strategy to post-partum contraception. We will evaluate effectiveness using a pre-post quasi-experimental design with stepped implementation and implementation using the RE-AIM framework.DiscussionThis is the first hybrid effectiveness-implementation study of an integrated reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health intervention in rural Nepal that we are aware of. As Nepal takes steps towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, the data from this three-year study will be useful in the detailed planning of a professionalized community health worker cadre delivering evidence-based reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health interventions to the country’s rural population.Trial registrationClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT03371186, registered 04 December 2017, retrospectively registered.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s13012-018-0741-x) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Background: Global health academic partnerships are centered around a core tension: they often mirror or reproduce the very cross-national inequities they seek to alleviate. On the one hand, they risk worsening power dynamics that perpetuate health disparities; on the other, they form an essential response to the need for healthcare resources to reach marginalized populations across the globe. Objectives: This study characterizes the broader landscape of global health academic partnerships, including challenges to developing ethical, equitable, and sustainable models. It then lays out guiding principles of the specific partnership approach, and considers how lessons learned might be applied in other resource-limited settings. Methods: The experience of a partnership between the Ministry of Health in Nepal, the non-profit healthcare provider Possible, and the Health Equity Action and Leadership Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine was reviewed. The quality and effectiveness of the partnership was assessed using the Tropical Health and Education Trust Principles of Partnership framework. Results: Various strategies can be taken by partnerships to better align the perspectives of patients and public sector providers with those of expatriate physicians. Actions can also be taken to bring greater equity to the wealth and power gaps inherent within global health academic partnerships. Conclusions: This study provides recommendations gleaned from the analysis, with an aim towards both future refinement of the partnership and broader applications of its lessons and principles. It specifically highlights the importance of targeted engagements with academic medical centers and the need for efficient organizational work-flow practices. It considers how to both prioritize national and host institution goals, and meet the career development needs of global health clinicians.
This paper reports on an innovative whole-systems approach to improving uptake of breast screening in Tower Hamlets, a deprived borough in the East End of London with a large minority ethnic population. The approach, developed by the public health team at NHS Tower Hamlets, draws on analysis of needs and existing literature about effective interventions to promote breast screening. Social marketing research led to a campaign targeted at Bangladeshi women, together with a range of initiatives to promote breast screening through primary care services and community outreach through local well-known organisations. The breast screening service itself was upgraded and a new service specification is being introduced from April 2009.
IntroductionThe termination of unwanted pregnancies up to 12 weeks’ gestation became legal in Nepal in 2002. Many interventions have taken place to expand access to comprehensive abortion care services. However, comprehensive abortion care services remain out of reach for women in rural and remote areas. This article describes a training and support strategy to train auxiliary nurse‐midwives (ANMs), already certified as skilled birth attendants, as medical abortion providers and expand geographic access to safe abortion care to the community level in Nepal.MethodsThis was a descriptive program evaluation. Sites and trainees were selected using standardized assessment tools to determine minimum facility requirements and willingness to provide medical abortion after training. Training was evaluated via posttests and observational checklists. Service statistics were collected through the government's facility logbook for safe abortion services (HMIS‐11).ResultsBy the end of June 2014, medical abortion service had been expanded to 25 districts through 463 listed ANMs at 290 listed primary‐level facilities and served 25,187 women. Providers report a high level of confidence in their medical abortion skills and considerable clinical knowledge and capacity in medical abortion.DiscussionThe Nepali experience demonstrates that safe induced abortion care can be provided by ANMs, even in remote primary‐level health facilities. Post‐training support for providers is critical in helping ANMs handle potential barriers to medical abortion service provision and build lasting capacity in medical abortion.
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