Good maternal health care also needs well-trained support staff

by | Nov 30, 2022 | Health Practitioners, Health Systems | 0 comments

Since successfully completing the construction of new health infrastructure – four rural maternity clinics, three large maternity waiting homes and three small maternity waiting homes – the project has been working to make each new health facility a model of gender-sensitive, humanized, community-engaged care. As part of this process, the latest health training courses have focused on some of the players and processes least visible to the public but essential to the provision of quality maternal health care: general service employees and waste management.

Eight staff members from the new health facilities participated in a two-day training session on biomedical waste management and health facility upkeep in the ongoing COVID-19 context. The first day took place in classrooms at the Massinga Institution for Health Training. During the second day, participants travelled to the new maternity in Tevele, Massinga for on-site practical training experience. The project’s Environmental Coordinator facilitated the training in collaboration with provincial health directorate managers for waste management and maintenance and project staff. Horácio Mandevo, the project’s Acting Mozambique Director, said that this training was especially important for strengthening the general service employees’ communication skills and highlighting their important roles in preventing sickness, promoting good health, and creating a positive environment for health facility users.

Each person who participated in the training session is responsible for their facility’s general cleaning and upkeep and is now the biomedical waste management focal point. The project developed this training course as an innovation to reach the key people involved in this area of work. None of the participants had been engaged in continuing education or on-site training activities prior to this and everyone agreed that the experience was highly useful. The group left feeling more confident in their work and more valued for their contributions to the overall success of the health facilities’ provision of high quality maternal and newborn care.

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Welcome!

Thank you for your interest in the Mozambique-Canada Maternal Health Project. This project came to an end on June 30, 2024. You may continue to the site to see our final update and find out what we did, but please keep in mind that it is an archived site and will no longer be updated.

We now have a new project**: Sexual and Reproductive Health for Young Women in Inhambane**. We will be activating its website soon.

The new project builds on the old one, but with some changes to adapt to new realities. We will continue to seek improved, sexual, reproductive and maternal health and rights for women, now focusing more on adolescent girls and younger women, within the context of model communities of care, taking into consideration their families and their communities. We will continue to partner with community health communities (now 30 compared to 20) within selected districts in Inhambane (now 6 rather than 5). We will also continue to partner with the provincial health directorate (DPSI) to improve infrastructural and human resources in the health system. And we will continue to carry out helpful research and disseminate information.

Let us know if you would like to be notified when our new site is up!