The Federal Ministry of Health of Ethiopia just released the first volume of the Ethiopian Health Care Quality Bulletin.  Ethiopia’s national quality strategy emphasizes the importance of sharing best practices across facilities and institutions to support quality improvement in healthcare. Maternal and newborn health served as a pathfinder for the work on quality improvement, which is now expanding to other sectors such as family planning, nutrition and safe surgery.

This Bulletin presents major initiatives under the Health Service Quality Directorate as well as quality improvement projects and studies selected for learning purposes.

Download the Bulletin

Photo: Maternal and Newborn health serves as a pathfinder for quality improvement in Ethiopia. Here,  Kindehafti Alayu with her twenty-five days old Selamawit Hayleye in Debri Health Centre, during the  breastfeeding celebration event  in Tigray, Ethiopia, in August 2017. © UNICEF/UN0140353/Ayene

Women Deliver Conference side event:

Join a UNICEF side event at the Women Deliver Conference to discuss, engage and collaborate with key partners on enhancing country level technical and financial support towards achieving maternal and newborn health goals.

The session will highlight the importance of coordination and leveraging resources for
quality MNCH at scale, including country experiences and learning from district level
implementation of the ‘Every Mother Every Newborn Quality Improvement’ (EMEN QI)
initiative. The EMEN QI initiative aims to improve quality of facility-based care for both
mothers and newborns.

Tuesday June 4th, 2019, 6:00 am – 8:00 am PST

Room 109, Vancouver Convention Center, Canada

Women Deliver Conference side event:

Digital tools and innovations are rapidly changing the landscape of health worker education. The International Confederation of Midwives (ICM), Laerdal Global Health and Maternity Foundation invite you to join global frontrunners in the digital health arena for an EdTech Talk on the future of health worker training.

June 4th, 4:30pm - 6:30pm

Mackenzie Ballroom, Vancouver Fairmont Waterfront Hotel

Canada

Talks by:

• Keynote by high-level speaker (to be announced)
• Franka Cadée, President of International Confederation of Midwives, ICM
• Tore Laerdal, Executive Chairman of Laerdal Global Health
• Anna Frellsen, CEO of Maternity Foundation
• Maria Langworthy, Director of Worldwide Education Research at Microsoft
• Genevieve Musokwa, CEO of Nonkhululeko Nursing and Midwifery Agency, former President of Midwives Association of Zambia, MAZ

Sign up 

Women Deliver Conference side event:

Survive and Thrive: Transforming care for every small and sick newborn

If you are at the Women Deliver Conference, join WHO, UNICEF, Every Preemie—SCALE and others for a vibrant discussion around the concept of no separation between mother (father or other family members) and baby, from the time of birth through discharge from the facility. The conversation will include highlights from the new WHO/UNICEF global report, Survive and Thrive: Transforming care for every small and sick newborn.

Tuesday, June 4, 2019, 5:00pm – 7:00pm

Fairmont Waterfront Hotel, Nootka Meeting Room

900 Canada Pl, Vancouver, Canada

RSVP here 

Photo:  Nakiru Betty attends to her baby in a Kangaroo treatment at Kabong referral hospital, Uganda,  in May 2017. The baby, her 5th-born was born prematurely. .© UNICEF/Henry Bongyereirwe

The BMGF Maternal, Newborn and Child Health and Discovery teams have published an open Request for Concept Notes to identify a partner(s) to help drive innovation testing and implementation research for improved antenatal (ANC) and postnatal care (PNC) outcomes.

The grantee will conduct implementation research with the goal of improving ANC and PNC service delivery and related health outcomes, and will learn and share how the selected innovations achieved these outcomes. The grantee will contribute to developing BMGF’s  multi-country implementation research agenda to improve service delivery that will answer the following question (in collaboration with host governments): How can supply and demand-side innovations spur increased a) early initiation of ANC, b) continuity of ANC and PNC visits, c) quality of care and d) a system more responsive to women’s needs?

Deadline for applications: 10 June, 2019.

Apply

Read more

For more information, contact ancpnc@gatesfoundation.org

Photo: Midwife Reda with the newborn baby from mother Mary Samuel who gave birth in the Juba Teaching hospital, South Sudan in July 2018. © UNICEF

If you are at the World Health Assembly:

Date: 23 May 2019, Time: 7:45 – 9:30

Location: Chateau de Penthes, Genev

This event will provide an opportunity to engage in an interactive discussion on the key findings and messages from the IAP reports (in particular, Private Sector: Who is Accountable?) and two recent reports by OECD. Speakers and participants alike will share good practices and challenges to delivering on the pledge of the 2030 Agenda to leave no one behind.

See the invitation

RSVP: https://bit.ly/2Vu1X8K

Co-Sponsors include: The Independent Accountability Panel (IAP), OECD, PMNCH and the EWEC Secretariat

This 5th May, celebrate the International Day of the Midwife under the theme Midwives: Defenders of Women’s Rights.  

The International Confederation of Midwives (ICM) has put together an advocacy toolkit and resource pack to help you raise awareness about the role that midwives play in reducing maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality, celebrate their contribution to improving sexual, reproductive, maternal and newborn health outcomes or advocate for adequate midwifery resources. 

Check it out  here.

The Network for Improving Quality of Care for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (Quality of Care Network) held its 2nd meeting on Demonstrating accountability and learning from implementation on March 12-14, 2019, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. During the three-day event, Kenya joined the Quality of Care Network, thereby becoming the 11th country[1] leading the Network and committing to making rapid progress in improving quality of care. 

Two years after the launch of the Network, the meeting brought together twenty-two countries, national, regional and global partners, development organisations, NGOs, private sector, professional associations, academia and research institutions to share progress, learn from experiences in developing quality of care programmes, and inform the future directions of the Network.

In a statement, the participants in the meeting reaffirmed their commitment to the goals of the Quality of Care Network to halve maternal and newborn deaths and stillbirths and improve the experience of care in participating facilities by 2022.  They committed to continue to work under government leadership and in collaboration and coordination with key stakeholders to implement the national strategies and plans for improving quality in maternal, newborn and child health services, including adolescents.  

Download the statement

More resources about the meeting

[1] The countries are: Bangladesh, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, the United Republic of Tanzania and Uganda.

On March 12-14, 2019, the Network for Improving Quality of Care for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (Quality of Care Network) will hold its 2nd meeting on Demonstrating accountability and learning from implementation in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.  The meeting will bring together representatives from the ten countries that lead the Quality of Care Network and partners to share their progress, learn from their experiences in developing quality of care programmes, and inform the future directions of the Network.

When launching the Quality of Care Network in February 2017, the countries leading it - Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, India, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania and Uganda, joined in 2018 by Sierra Leone - committed to halving the number of maternal and newborn deaths and stillbirths in participating health facilities by 2022 and to improve the experience of care. Under the leadership of their Ministries of Health, with the support of WHO, UNICEF and UNFPA and a broad coalition of partners, the Quality of Care Network supports the implementation of national strategies for quality of care in the health sector by using maternal, newborn and child health as a pathfinder.

Two years on, these countries  are coming together this week, not only to take stock, but to discuss what implementing quality improvement takes – what systems need to be in place - the challenges in improving quality of care for women and children at national, district, and facility levels and what their ‘learning districts’ have taught them along the way.  One main lesson is that sustained quality of care requires changes at all level of the health system, supported by five systems: on-site support for quality improvement in facilities, a learning system for solution seeking, a data system to report on patient outcomes and inform further quality of care programmes, a community engagement system, and a management system to deliver quality services.

Each country in the Quality of Care Network will share their leaning and data from the first phase of implementation. Participants will attend skill-building labs on topics including, among others, community engagement, advocacy for quality of care, or the links between emergency obstetric care and quality of cate. Innovation labs, led by organizations that are developing and implementing innovative solutions to improve the quality of maternal and newborn health, will give participants the opportunity to test these solutions’ relevance and feasibility in their context.

Representatives from the Ministries of Health of each country, UNICEF, WHO, UNFPA, bilateral development partners, non-governmental organisations, academia, as well as from health facilities will attend the meeting.

More resources about the meeting