The Impact Health Project

The Impact Health Project.

Improving Maternal Health Outcomes

Background

In Sub-Saharan Africa, a woman has a 1 -in -16 chance of dying during pregnancy or childbirth. Nigeria accounts for about 20% of global maternal deaths, with a maternal mortality ratio of 800 deaths per 100,000 live births; among the highest in the world.

The above witnessed rates are caused by factors such as delay in access to skilled health worker and service by the pregnant woman, cost implications of health services, as well as delay in access to the health service centres, which discourages health seeking behaviour of these women, thereby reducing their chances of getting tested or treated from diseases. These factors rest on certain root causes, one of which is inadequacy of accurate data to form an evidence base that informs health care intervention, policy decision-making, and service delivery management.

Considering the role that women play socially, and economically in building stronger communities and families, particularly in nutrition and education of children, it therefore becomes essential to ensure that these challenges are tackled with all possible strength in order to secure the health and productivity of women before, during, and after pregnancy.

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Our Approach

CREATE	TRAIN	SUPPORT	REPORT	ENSURE LASTING CHANGE
Develop and deploy web-based and mobile enabled data management system, built to fit in the context of data collection patterns at the health service provision centres.	Organize training for healthcare workers and supervisors at health facilities, ministries of health on how to use technology and the Impact health platform to collect and report routine health data during antenatal care, immunization, and postnatal care service deliver.	Support health institutions and healthcare workers with mobile devices, mobile data, and technical support to successfully integrate technology empowered data management with their pre-existing manual data management system until the health system has enough capacity to fully deploy electronic data management	Strengthen the supervisors and state ministries of health to monitor, analyse, and interpret the data from healthcare centres. This allows for timely evaluation of service delivery and efficiency of the healthcare centre.	To ensure continued relevance, the Impact Health Project will continually involve the ministries of health and health workers in the design, implementation, and review of the project post implementation, to ensure that the strategy and activities are evidence informed.

Activities So Far

1 Family health campaign was carried out across 21 local government areas (LGA) in Oyo state, in 6 wards per LGA over 3 weeks.
2 Holistic data on the health status of 60,000 households were collected.
3 Data collectors were trained and provided with data enabled mobile phones to collect data using the Impact Health survey application.
4 Each surveyed household received a unique family health survey card.
5 Family health campaign was carried out across 21 local government areas (LGA) in Oyo state, in 6 wards per LGA over 3 weeks.

Our Progress So Far

350 health workers trained on leveraging mobile devices to deliver maternal health service and reduce maternal and child morbidity.

95 Primary Health Care facilities across 17 LGAs in Oyo state have been supported with mobile devices to optimize maternal health record collection and service delivery.

Strong partnership with key stakeholders in Oyo state.

Key Opportunities

Integration: We will leverage the platform and tools to integrate family planning, malaria and HIV and maternal health interventions thereby helping the states to accelerate the impact of their health response.

Expansion: We will be expanding to other ministries of health across the 6 geo-political zones in Nigeria.

1 Health workers have acquired digital skills; that will serve as a good foundation for digitizing the healthcare system.
2 Improved health seeking behaviour, reduced wait time at to encourage positive health seeking behaviours by women and girls.
3 Connected PHCs and health workers will facilitate knowledge sharing among health workers, key stakeholders and patients.
4 Real time availability of data can improve the quality of health decision at local and state levels and provide evidence for increased investment from private sector.