Developing a Mentorship Program in Laos

Abstract

Skills strengthening and capacity building for maternal and newborn health (MNH) providers are essential to ensure quality care for mothers and newborns. There is, however, limited research regarding what constitutes an effective model in low-income countries. The Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Laos) has some of the region’s worst outcomes for neonatal and maternal mortality. Moreover, with a 23-year hiatus in midwifery training, which ended approximately 7 years ago, there is a cadre of new and inexperienced midwives in practice without support systems, skills, or continuing professional development opportunities. Traditional didactic teaching methodologies prevail in Laos, but with little evidence of efficacy. As an alternative model, Save the Children International has been implementing a mentorship approach for MNH providers in two provinces in northern Laos since January 2016, with technical guidance and funding from the United States Agency for International Development-supported global Maternal Child Survival Program. This community case study will describe and reflect on the approach by highlighting the need and rationale for mentorship, followed by a description of the program’s core components and the results observed so far. Lessons learned and the application of the approach to different contexts and health-care professionals, considering both constraints and opportunities, will be discussed.

Developing and implementing a model of equitable distribution of mentorship in districts with spatial inequities and maldistribution of human resources for maternal and newborn care in Rwanda

“…In addition, results revealed that knowledge and self-efficacy correlated moderately positive at pre-mentorship (r = 0.214) and strongly positive at post-mentorship ( r = 0.58) [ 24 ]. These findings are also consistent with the findings of other studies that have assessed mentorship programmes at both the facility and educational level and found that such mentorships are beneficial to the health providers and improve the quality of care delivery [ 13 – 15 , 21 ].…”

“…Mentorship is a flexible teaching and learning process that serves specific objectives of the HCPs and health care services [ 13 – 15 , 21 ]. Given the disparities in maternal health services [ 22 ] and previous training programs that were provided to midwives, the TSAM project targeted staff providing care to women and newborns.…”

“…Several studies have revealed that didactic training does not effectively translate knowledge into practice to address system-level barriers [ 11 , 12 ]. However, mentorship programmes have been shown to improve the quality of care in many countries [ 13 – 15 ]. Consequently, the provision of CPD programmes like mentorship has been identified as necessary, especially in contexts dealing with HCPs limitations.…”

Developing and implementing a novel mentorship model (4+ 1) for maternal, newborn and child health in Rwanda

“…In high-income countries mentorship is considered essential to support the professional development of health professions faculty at all levels, and to role model professionalism for students in the health professions. Although research in LICs is limited, mentorship programs have been shown to improve quality of care [15][16][17]. Mentorship has been identified as a teaching and learning process that can assist HCPs working in a complex clinical setting to provide quality health care services [6,9,10,[16][17][18][19][20].…”

“…Although research in LICs is limited, mentorship programs have been shown to improve quality of care [ 15 – 17 ]. Mentorship has been identified as a teaching and learning process that can assist HCPs working in a complex clinical setting to provide quality health care services [ 6 , 9 , 10 , 16 – 20 ]. A mentorship program could support HCPs in rural areas in ways that the traditional hierarchical supervision model does not.…”