Maternity waiting homes in Southern Lao PDR: The unique ‘silk home’

Abstract

The concept of maternity waiting homes (MWH) has a long history spanning over 100 years. The research reported here was conducted in the Thateng District of Sekong Province in southern Lao People's Democratic Republic (PDR) to establish whether the MWH concept would be affordable, accessible, and most importantly acceptable, as a strategy to improve maternal outcomes in the remote communities of Thateng with a high proportion of the population from ethnic minority groups. The research suggested that there were major barriers to minority ethnic groups using existing maternal health services (reflected in very low usage of trained birth attendants and hospitals and clinics) in Thateng. Unless MWH are adapted to overcome these potential barriers, such initiatives will suffer the same fate as existing maternal facilities. Consequently, the Lao iteration of the concept, as operationalized in the Silk Homes project in southern Lao PDR is unique in combining maternal and infant health services with opportunities for micro credit and income generating activities and allowing non-harmful traditional practices to co-exist alongside modern medical protocols. These innovative approaches to the MWH concept address the major economic, social and cultural barriers to usage of safe birthing options in remote communities of southern Lao PDR.

Exploring women's perspectives of access to care during pregnancy and childbirth: A qualitative study from rural Papua New Guinea

“…These findings are similar to many developing countries, including Laos (Eckermann and Deodato, 2008), Pakistan (Shaikh and Hatcher, 2005), Nigeria (Onah et al, 2006), Uganda (Amooti- Kaguna and Nuwaha, 2000), Tanzania (Magoma et al, 2010), Burkina Faso (Some et al, 2011) and Indonesia (Titaley et al, 2010).…”

Understanding the implementation of maternity waiting homes in low- and middle-income countries: a qualitative thematic synthesis

“…A number of studies reported that simply building a MWH did not overcome barriers to accessing care as women still needed financial resources to get to the MWH [15, 17, 25, 28, 30]. The cost of public transportation to reach the MWH was a common barrier to its use and varied depending on the mode of transport distance and time of day [13].…”

Maternity waiting homes: A panacea for maternal/neonatal conundrums in Eritrea

“…One of the tested and proven strategies is the establishment of maternity waiting homes a practice which has been in existence for more than 100 years [9][10][11] . In developing countries even under the best of times, the delivery rate in health facilities is less than 30% with as low as 15% in other settings 6 .…”

“…Because of the unscheduled nature of deliveries and the preponderance for deliveries to occur at night compounded by nonavailability of transport and ambulance services, the need for maternity waiting homes becomes apparent 9 . Pregnancy outcomes from high risk pregnancies for mothers who delivered in maternity waiting homes were reported to be similar or better than those who delivered in the home under the services of TBAs 2 .…”