Posting midwives UNFPA priority

Posting midwives in every health facility will top the priorities of the new UNFPA chief in Dhaka for reducing child birth-related deaths in Bangladesh.

Nurul Islam Hasibbdnews24.com
Published : 7 March 2014, 04:26 PM
Updated : 7 March 2014, 06:06 PM

Argentina Piccin says she is ‘satisfied’ that Bangladesh has started midwifery training courses, but the process of creating separate posts in the health sector is “too slow” for those already trained to remember.

Midwifery was like surgery, if one did not practice, they would lose the skills, she told a group of journalists on Thursday in her first media interaction after she took office in Aug.

A Mozambique national, Piccin served as the UN population agency’s representative in Mongolia and Botswana prior to her Dhaka assignment.

She joined at a time when the 20-year programme of action of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo ended in 2014 and a new set of plan would launch globally at the beginning of 2015.

The ICPD is focused on individual’s needs and rights rather than on achieving demographic targets.

It mandates the UNFPA to work on sexual and reproductive health and rights, population issues, and gender equalities in countries like Bangladesh where policymakers are shy to speak about sexual and reproductive health.

Piccin said ICPD remained as “an unfinished agenda” in the world and that as a UN agency, UNFPA would continue to press for rights of all citizens in Bangladesh including lesbian, gay and transgender people.

“My job is to try and show them (government) the benefits of working and serving every single group in the country.”

The ICPD speaks of “universality, which means for all”.

But she said, midwifery, ending child marriage and reducing gender-based violence and family planning would be her areas of focus during her stay over the next four years in Dhaka. She believed all of those “converts towards reduce maternal and newborn deaths”.

Bangladesh is one of the developing countries in the world which is on track of achieving UN-set MDGs by 2015 on maternal and child health.

Still, 194 would-be-mothers die while giving births among 100,000, as nearly 70 percent deliver at the hands of unskilled providers at home.

Of the deaths, a major contributor is teenage pregnancy as Bangladesh’s child marriage is the highest in Asia.

The government only recently started training midwives as Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina made a commitment before the UN in 2010 that she would train and post 3,000 midwives by 2015 when MDGs ended.

The UNFPA chief said after the commitment coming from the highest level, they had started training and already converted more than 700 nurses to midwives giving them six-month training.

A three-year diploma course has also been started to enrol fresh groups for the midwifery course.

“Midwifery is a special branch of nursing. (Midwives) are specifically trained with assisting deliveries and checking up pregnancies,” she said.

The process of creating posts was going on, but it was so slow that “soon (those trained) will forget what they learn”.

“We’ll continue to advocate,” Piccin said, “governments around the world are not known to be fast, but we need to accelerate (creating posts) for them”.

She said ending child marriage was ‘critical’ for Bangladesh as 66 percent of them become pregnant in their teens despite their being not ready. “So it will not be possible to reduce maternal mortality to a minimum and unavoidable level”.

“We have to work to end this”.

But for this, she said, there must be political will to ensure that no one gets married before the age of 18.

“It needs a champion in government, in parliament they need to take it as priority to allocate proper level of resources.”

The new UNFPA chief stressed on electronic ‘civil registration’ system in which she said no one would be able to fake birth date.

“And at the same time local administration needs to be held accountable for registration. It’s easy for the government, and law enforcement has to take it seriously”.

But she said community awareness was a must to change the mindset. “We need to work with children, parents on the benefit of letting their girls finish schools”.

“We need to work with young males to value their sisters. We need to instill a sense of pride in a young male to respect fellow girls,” she said as social security and dowry were the major reasons of Bangladesh’s child marriage.

As Bangladesh aims to be a middle-income country by 2021, the UN representative said it should be “in all sense, not only in economic terms.”

And that’s why Bangladesh needed midwives so that no one delivered at the hands of unskilled providers and die, the UNFPA chief said.