*SCHOOL LEAVERS TO BE TRAINED DIRECTLY
By ZAMBIA NEWS FEATURES CORRESPONDENT
The Zambian government has introduced a new direct entry midwifery course to allow for training of more midwives and has extended retention schemes to tutors in training schools to bolster the professional human resource available for maternal health care.
Currently, only trained general nurses are accepted for further training as midwives.
President Rupiah Banda also disclosed that the country has recorded a decrease in maternal mortality ratio from 729 deaths per 100,000 lives births in the year 2000 to 591 deaths in the year 2007.
Banda who launched the Campaign for Accelerated Reduction of Maternal Mortality in Zambia (CARMMZ) in Lusaka Saturday under theme “Africa cares: No woman should die while giving life” said government has taken steps to enhance safe and successful childbirth that includes the construction of 33 district hospitals.
Banda said the launch of CARMA in Zambia was a critical development because large numbers of women who die during child birth.
“This is a global crisis with one woman dying per minute. This translates into over half a million women dying every year,” he said.
The President said government was gravely concerned about the deficiencies in the health sector and their impact on expectant women adding that it was a collective duty as nations and governments to tackle deaths during childbirth so that the right to life was not terminated in the very circumstances where new life should brought into the world.
“For this reason I must appeal to all organizations and institutions represented here to partner with government to build a health system that is responsive to the needs of expectant women, babies and children,” President Banda said.
He said there was need to give every woman the information and support to control her reproductive life, help her through pregnancy, and take care of her and her newborn well into a healthy childhood.
Banda directed the Ministries of Health and Finance and National Planning (MFNP) to work closely and get maternal mortality recognized as a key indicator of a functioning health system and nation.
He said with the training of medical professionals around the country, government keenly supported the training of traditional birth attendants in rural areas.
“There are rural areas where quality medical care cannot be accessed because of long distances, and it is such areas that traditional birth attendants have in some cases made the telling differences,” he said.
Banda said government was fully cognizant that there was need for sustainable high level of efforts to reduce maternal mortality stating that deaths during pregnancies were considered to be the most avoidable and preventable if women had access to quality family planning services, skilled care during pregnancy and child birth.
In May last year the African Union (AU) officially launched CARMA in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as one of the programmes for other African countries to do so in a bid to address maternal mortality and 16 countries have so far launched it.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), 1500 women die daily from pregnancy or childbirth-related complications. In 2005, there were an estimated 536,000 maternal deaths worldwide. Most of these deaths occurred in developing countries, and most were avoidable.
Improving maternal health is one of the eight Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) adopted by the international community at the United Nations Millennium Summit in 2000.
(Edited by Gershom Ndhlovu)
