Some Ideas to Improve Maternal and Child Health

Speaking about maternal health refers to the health of women during three crucial stages, i.e., Pregnancy, Childbirth as well as Postnatal Period. Every stage must have a positive experience, making sure that both mothers and their babies reach their complete potential for better health and well-being.

Even though some major progress related to maternal and child health care has been witnessed in the last few decades, some reports have informed that more than 200,000 women died during as well as following pregnancy and childbirth in 2021. With proper care and by following the necessary steps, maternal and child health can be improved, and the death rate can be reduced.

Title V Block Grant Programme

This is an effective maternal and child health programme that funds more than 55 states to offer better health care services. Under this program, every state determines the right and effective approaches to address maternal and child health, maternal disease and more. For instance, some support reviews detect primary causes of death, monitor the trend and prevent possible future death.

Healthy Start

In some cases, a community-based approach can be followed to effectively improve women’s health before, during as well as after pregnancy. Besides, this can also help in improving a newborn child’s health. It is important to put maximum effort into this without any biases. For example, there should be an approach that can reduce the ethnic and racial differences in death rates of the infant along with other adverse child and maternal health outcomes.

Increasing Access to Better Care

Access to better quality healthcare is a crucial factor that can greatly influence maternal and child health outcomes. As per the healthcare experts, such improvements will require more PAs- Physician Associates, nurse practitioners, gynaecologists and more. PAs can play a major role in improving the help of both women and children.

They should be trained properly to handle different complex cases. For example, PAs should know how to effectively manage various comorbidities, like diabetes, hypertension, etc. They should also learn obstetrics. A good Maternal and child health programme will be able to educate people about maternal health.

Empower Women

It is a fact that the lower social status of girls and women is a major reason behind less education among them. As a result, they don’t know where they can easily access good maternal healthcare when required. On the other hand, every man should also be educated about the fundamental human rights of a woman, focusing more on their rights to access better healthcare services.

Setting Up Refugee Camps

This idea can be very helpful in conflict or extreme poverty areas. It is important to offer refugee camps the required resources to effectively transform any location into a safe, clean and properly-equipped health facility. They should use safe delivery kits containing commodities to safely deliver a baby. It will be better if steps are taken to offer antenatal care for pregnant women. The government in every state can take the necessary steps to offer free antenatal education programs.

Modifying Health’s Social Determinants

Some agencies are now working to effectively address the social determinants as well as racial disparities in health. Every maternal and child health programme and education material should aim at enhancing patient-provider communication as well as decision-making. There are some programmes that support different services for women and children, including assisting new mothers in getting information to promote smoking cessation, mental health and birth spacing.

Go Mobile

Mobile health systems can be used to easily collect data and report security threats and stock-outs and can also be used to obtain data in different rural facilities. If such devices can be connected to a mobile network, the data can be automatically transferred to the health information systems, avoiding data duplicity and saving time. Well, conflict can affect the infrastructure and also disrupt access to networks, but there are devices designed for low-resource configurations.

Final Thoughts

These are some of the effective ideas that can help in improving maternal and child health. As the cases of maternal death are rising, it is important to focus on this matter and educate people about this through an effective maternal and child health programme. This is a situation that is avoidable.