With over 150 maternal mortality cases daily in our country Nigeria (80% of which is preventable), we have been remained resolute committed to actualizing our vision and mantra; “to create a world without preventable childhood and maternal mortality. An active step we have been taking is provision of free antenatal information and easy access to quality services. This further birthed our maiden community outreach project.
Our outreach project aims to achieve 4 key items;
- Increasing the awareness and knowledge of antenatal care among pregnant women.
- Educating expectant mothers about preventive measures and early symptoms of leading causes of maternal mortality.
- Promoting the use of mobile health technology among pregnant women and;
- Increasing antenatal care visits among pregnant women.
Starting from our immediate locality, Ibadan, we target women in local communities of Ibadan-North LGA , with a rough estimate of 50 women per primary healthcare centre. In this project, we are going to collaborate with primary healthcare centres around selected localities of Ibadan. The event of this outreach mainly revolves around 4 main activities which are:
- Baseline checkup; which is mainly about checking up the health status of pregnant women. This includes measurement of BMI, blood pressure, urinalysis test amongst others.
- Healthcare education/advocacy; which mainly involves educating pregnant women using Yoruba/simple English as a medium of communication on antenatal healthcare [mainly about pre-eclampsia and postpartum heamorrhage(PPT)], discouraging home delivery and unsafe abortion. A question and answer session will also take place to give room for the women to ask questions generally about their health.
- MyBelle Digital Directory; which mainly involves collecting the contact details of pregnant women interested in follow-ups (SMS and Whtasapp).
After the completion of this project, we believe we would have changed the attitude of expectant mothers towards antenatal visits with increased number of visitations, also to increase their awareness and everythin they need to know about their health, and lastly to increase the number of entries on MyBelle digital health directory.
This project is scheduled to last till the end of the year.