In Ethiopia, at least 61 women die every day due to pregnancy or childbirth. In addition to this, each day 1,227 women develop a long-term serious pregnancy-related complication. Clearly, any death is a huge tragedy. However, in Ethiopia, when a mother dies, the whole family will struggle to cope and children will often have to fend for themselves. These children frequently succumb to malnutrition, injury and disease, contributing to the harsh reality that 10% of children in Ethiopia die before they reach the age of 5 years.
It is important to recognise, however, that this situation has improved greatly over the past decade, when the death rate for pregnant women was almost double that of today. A key factor contributing to the reduction in maternal mortality is the improvement in maternity services. This includes training programmes for midwives, the provision of emergency equipment and drugs, and transportation to hospital services when needed. These things have only been possible through the generous donations from people like yourselves.
I will be spending a year in Gimbie, which is in the West Wollega region of Ethiopia. I will be working on a project to identify which pregnant women most benefit from delivering their baby in the health centre or the hospital. Currently around 95% of women have their babies at home, with the majority of them being delivered by a friend or neighbour. For many women this is a reasonable thing to do. Apart from the fact that there are not enough hospital beds or doctors and nurses for everyone to have their baby in hospital, many women will have an uncomplicated birth safely at home.
The problem is that for some women, complications start to develop towards the end of the pregnancy and during the labour. When this occurs, however, they will often be too far away from a hospital that can provide help. Since there is virtually no transportation, it can take a woman 6 hours or more to walk to hospital. If she is lucky, her family will construct a stretcher for her to be carried to the hospital. Either way, these 6 hours or more are crucial and literally represent a matter or life or death. It is therefore vital for us to be able to identify the women who need to get to the hospital when their labour commences and before the complications arise.
The project that I will be setting up is to introduce a simple scoring system to identify women who are at greatest risk of developing a serious complication during labour. Part of this score requires that the position of the baby and the placenta is viewed on a portable ultrasound machine. By detecting any abnormalities and combining these factors with other clinical signs such as high blood pressure, it will be possible to identify which women are at greatest risk of dying during childbirth.
I am raising money to purchase one or two portable ultrasound machines that will help identify some of the risk factors and ultimately help to reduce the number of women dying in childbirth. Your help in raising the £4000 needed to purchase each of the ultrasound machines is essential and I am extremely grateful for any support that you are able to give.
If you would like to follow my progress over the year, I will be updating my blog most weeks (if the internet connection is working):http://faranjatgimbie.blogspot.com/
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