Platform to review child, mother deaths set for expansion

Imagine if every death of a baby or woman during childbirth is recorded and reviewed in hopes of preventing future deaths. That’s what a project, Quality Assurance in Obstetrics, wants to do–not with manual records but on an electronic web-based platform. A pilot of the project, run by Rotary, started in 2008 in 10 hospitals […]

Imagine if every death of a baby or woman during childbirth is recorded and reviewed in hopes of preventing future deaths.

That’s what a project, Quality Assurance in Obstetrics, wants to do–not with manual records but on an electronic web-based platform.

A pilot of the project, run by Rotary, started in 2008 in 10 hospitals across Kaduna, Kano, the FCT, Ondo and Enugu.

Now the federal health ministry wants Rotary to scale up the project and roll it out nationwide, says Emmanuel Lufadeju, coordinator of the project.

“It’s a challenge but we are going to do it,” he says.

QAO is part of Nigeria’s ongoing experiment with Maternal and Perinatal Death Surveillance and Response.

It monitored structures, health facilities, process, service, quality of outcome and everything to do with pregnancy and childbirth using midwives who kept manual records.

By 2016, the record keeping went electronic, allowing data to be collected by the touch of a phone button.

“A record officer collects data, taps a button on his phone and the data goes to the state ministry of health where  a state statistician analyses it and generates reports which then goes to a federal statistician” says Lufadeju.

Last week, the project began training doctors, midwives and record officers from eight states.

They will monitor data on maternal deaths, deaths of children around time of birth, antenatal clinic attendance, contraceptive use, review of deaths and notifications.

“If a death occurs and is reviewed and you know the cause of death, you have a very good chance of preventing it from happening next time, because you will create interventions that will obliterate all those challenges,” says Lufadeju.

Rotary already runs maternal and perinatal death review in eight states but will scale up to cover all secondary hospitals in states where it doesn’t run, establish electronic data collection platforms in states it doesn’t work and expand to collect data in cases where childbirth is outside of health facilities.