Mozambique has been short of medical supplies, which meant that some clinics would turn women away in their first trimester, unless they could visually confirm the pregnancy or pay for a test. This drove women away from clinics; making them miss out on basic testing before they delivered. Moreover, it was hard to get to the clinics: a lack of time and transport kept many women from using clinic services. And even if they were able to get there to have a test, they were often unable to get back to get their results.
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| Photo: World Health Organisation |
Now women have better access to maternal health care. Each clinic receives complete antenatal care packages with all of the necessary medicines and laboratory supplies. WHO medical officer, Dr. Ana Pilar Betrán, explains that with the streamlined approach: “Waiting times are shorter and women are more positive and prompt to come in for their antenatal care visits.”
By the end of 2015, 10 clinics across Mozambique will be providing full antenatal care services under the programme. Dr. Betrán says that, “…if the intervention is proved efficient, then the next steps will be to expand the process and the intervention to the whole country.”
Dr. Betrán visited the first antenatal care clinic in the Nampula Province in Mozambique on 1 June 2014, for the launch of the programme, and was overwhelmed: “It was really incredible the amount of women that were in the waiting room.” Dr. Betrán and her team designed the programme, trained health care providers, and established storage and tracking systems for the equipment and medicine.
Antenatal care is an important factor in ensuring women deliver their babies safely, and that those babies are healthy. Women in the 10 pilot project areas are beginning to see why they need to visit health-care professionals during their pregnancy.
Women-centred health care
The new one-stop shop approach resulted from research carried out in 2011 through focus groups with women who experienced the clinics first-hand. Dr. Marleen Temmerman, Department Director of Reproductive Health and Research at WHO, explained the importance of this “person-centred” approach to health care and ensuring that everyone has access to the services they need, when they need them: “One of the cornerstones of achieving universal health coverage is to not only utilize evidence-based decision making, but to also speak with and understand the population affected.”
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