Maternal health to improve with use of “Safe Delivery App”

Ghana is to benefit tremendously from the launch of a “Safe Delivery App,” which is a technology learning application tool designed to empower skilled birth attendants to provide safer delivery services.

The new application, which can easily be downloaded free of charge from Google Play and at App Store using smartphones and other technological gadgets, also works offline once copied, and can currently be found in the English and French languages.

The App is a partnership between the Maternity Foundation, a Danish development organisation that aims to reduce maternal and newborn deaths in low-income countries, and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) and supported by the Royal Danish Embassy.

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It was developed by the Maternity Foundation over a four-year period and is currently being used in Ethiopia, India, Myanmar and Tanzania, to address maternal challenges.

Tove Degnbol, the Ambassador of Denmark, at the launch in Accra, expressed her frustration about the high maternal and child mortality recorded in the country in spite of the investments made over the years.

“I do not want to hide the fact that we have sometimes been very frustrated when we had to struggle to have our funds channelled out to the regional and district level to be spent on essential equipment for the health staff. It has been unbearable to see the rate of maternal mortality increasing in areas where we and other development partners had targeted our support,’’ she said.

Ms Degnbol said much more could be achieved to save lives when the bottlenecks in the financial management were addressed.

“During the more than two decades of our support, the maternal mortality rate was halved. This is a significant achievement, but the rate is still terribly high, and every single life of a woman that could have been spared is a tragedy for the family, for the newborn and motherless child, and for the society at large,’’ she said.

She commended the UNFPA for partnering with the Maternity Foundation for the App, which would help reach the remotest areas.

Anna Frellsen, the Chief Executive of the Maternity Foundation, said Ghana was a high priority country for the “Safe Delivery App,” given the need for improvement in basic emergency obstetric and neonatal care, and the expressed interest of the implementing partners.

The “App”, she said, had been designed to provide teaching and instructions for health professionals and birth attendants, especially those in hard-to-reach areas, on how to manage normal and complicated deliveries through simple animated clinical instruction films.

She said it provided skilled birth attendants with direct and instant access to evidenced-based and up-to-date clinical guidelines as pertained under the latest WHO Basic Emergency Obstetric and Neonatal Care and the Ministry of Health Guidelines and Procedures.

    Ms Frellsen, demonstrating how the “App” works, said it had four basic features involving: easy to understand animated instruction videos, action cards, drug list, and practical procedure instructions.

These would yield positive changes against the current high national maternal and child deaths rates.