Maternal Health Task Force
The Maternal Health Task Force strives to create a strong, well-informed and collaborative community of individuals focused on ending preventable maternal mortality and morbidity worldwide.
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Blog
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How to Treat Maternal Depression in Rural Ghana
Until recently, the health system in Ghana had been quite silent on maternal depression, which had a number of consequences on maternal and newborn outcomes. To address this need, The National Catholic Health Service, with funds from Grand Challenge Canada, rolled out a quality improvement project to reduce the treatment gap for perinatal depression in seven facilities in four regions in Ghana to improve early identification and treatment of maternally depressed women… read more
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Addressing Maternal Mental Health Through the Antenatal Platform: A Missed Opportunity
Across most settings, and particularly in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), antenatal care (ANC) is a critically missed opportunity to identify and support women with common mental health problems. ANC attendance in many LMICs is high and increasing and is one of the few junctures in a woman’s life where accessing health services is likely and may also be the first time she connects to the formal health system. From a practical perspective, introducing mental health screening and psychosocial interventions through ANC would allow more women to receive the screening, diagnosis and treatment they need, since postpartum care reaches only half the number of women that ANC does… read more
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The Importance of Listening to Women
Medical systems have historically devalued women’s experience with illness, often resulting in diagnoses and treatments that are not appropriate or relevant for women’s lives. Postpartum depression is no exception. One way to design more responsive health services is to thoughtfully listen to the experiences of women who are in a position to offer deep information about their disorder. We know that in Mexico, just under 20% of women experience depressive symptoms within the first five years of giving birth. What do the women themselves have to say about their experience of postpartum depression? What words do they use to talk about it? What are the problems it causes for them and what are their strategies for recovery? This is what we wanted to know and so we set out to listen to women… read more
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Where Are Neonatal Nurses in Global Strategies?
Having worked as neonatal nurses and educators for more than three decades collectively, we know that newborns who are born prematurely or sick are linked to either maternal perinatal health or the intrapartum experience. According to WHO, 45% of all under five deaths occur during the neonatal period (the first 28 days of life). New strategies seek to address the intrinsic link between maternal and newborn health outcomes. But nurses, a large segment of the health workforce, have for the most part been silent, or at least not active participants, in the construction of these plans. In the last few years, neonatal nurses have been asked to contribute only after much of the work has been done. Why is this so?… read more
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Why Maternal Mental Health Matters: A Case for Early Childhood Development
Early Childhood Care and Development (ECCD) programmes frequently depend upon the capacity of the primary caregiver, more often than not, the mother, to provide optimal care for her young child. Increasingly, early childhood strategies recognize the importance of addressing the caregiving context, both challenges and enablers, which influence the quality of care that a mother provides for her young child. These factors conspire to moderate the emotional availability a mother has to respond to her young child’s needs as well as the availability of resources she has to invest in herself and her child… read more
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New Jobs and Internships in Reproductive and Maternal Health
Looking for a job in reproductive and/or maternal health? Check out what’s available in the field…read more
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Measuring Content of Contacts Reveals Missed Opportunities to Deliver Quality Maternal and Newborn Health Care
Content of maternal and newborn health care needs to be measured to improve the quality of contacts between families and health workers, highlights research carried out by the IDEAS project, and published in PLoS ONE. The number of families that had contact with frontline workers suggested that demand for health care was increasing compared to previous reports from the same study sites. However, the percentage of women and babies who received care with all the recommended content was considerably lower across all stages of the continuum of care…… read more
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How Midwives Can Answer the World’s Maternal Health Woes
By: Linnea Bennett, Intern, Environmental Change and Security Program, Woodrow Wilson Center This blog post originally appeared on NewSecurityBeat.org The world is about to hit a “turning point” in maternal…
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Swept Under the Carpet: The Psychological Side of Maternal Health
In high-income countries, as many as 10 to 15 percent of women experience depression, anxiety, or other non-psychotic mental health challenges during pregnancy or the year after giving birth. In developing countries, the chances rise to 16 percent of pregnant women and 20 percent of post-natal women, according to Jane Fisher, professor of women’s health at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Despite the prevalence of these so-called perinatal common mental health disorders (PCMDs), they remain extremely underreported and undertreated. “We have a huge problem that has been kept under the carpet and it is just beginning to emerge,” said Dr. Ricardo Araya of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine at the Wilson Center on April 9… read more
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Ending Preventable Maternal Mortality: Bridges to Morbidity Reduction
Many averted maternal deaths may still result in maternal morbidity, including severe and/or chronic conditions. The Fistula Care Plus (FC+) Project at EngenderHealth works to help prevent and treat some of the most serious maternal morbidities, including obstetric fistula…read more