Extracts and a comment from me below. Full text: https://healthpolicy-watch.news/from-waiting-room-to-labour-how-task-shi...
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A Task Shifting/Task Sharing investment in Kano State in Nigeria is empowering community health workers and improving maternal and newborn outcomes...
Against this backdrop, Nigeria enacted a national Task-Shifting, Task-Sharing (TSTS) policy in 2014, formally expanding what CHEWs are permitted to do.
The policy has existed for more than a decade. However, making it work at the facility level is a different matter. That is the problem the TSTS investment set out to solve.
Implemented by Impact Catalysts and Pathfinder International Nigeria, in collaboration with the Kano State Primary Health Care Management Board (KNSPHCMB) and with support from the Gates Foundation, the investment has been running since November 2024 across 145 primary health care facilities in 26 LGAs in Kano State.
Its aim is straightforward: train and mentor CHEWs to safely provide selected maternal and newborn health services that previously depended on the availability of nurses or midwives...
The training, which ran for more than a week, covered Basic Emergency, Maternal, Obstetric and Newborn Care (BEmONC). This included the prevention, detection and management of postpartum haemorrhage using the E-MOTIVE bundle, management of pre-eclampsia, infant resuscitation, the use of a partograph to monitor the progress of labour, comprehensive antenatal assessment and counselling, postpartum contraception and neonatal vaccination...
The training is the foundation. The mentorship is what makes it stick. The TSTS investment engaged 26 senior nurses and midwives, each with decades of clinical experience, to serve as mentors across the 26 LGAs where it operates.
Each mentor is assigned to one LGA and rotates through the facilities in their area, observing CHEWs at work, assessing their skills, and providing continuous hands-on coaching...
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COMMENT (NPW): Our late colleague Joseph Ana would have been very happy to see these positive results. Among the many causes that he advocated, over decades he called for traditional birth attendants and lay health workers to receive basic training in obstetric skills. https://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.d3310.long Indeed I believe he contributed to Nigeria's National TaskShifting Policy of 2014: https://profmoosa.com/nigerian-task-shifting-task-sharing-policy/
HIFA profile: Neil Pakenham-Walsh is coordinator of HIFA (Healthcare Information For All), a global health community that brings all stakeholders together around the shared goal of universal access to reliable healthcare information. HIFA has 20,000 members in 180 countries, interacting in four languages and representing all parts of the global evidence ecosystem. HIFA is administered by Global Healthcare Information Network, a UK-based nonprofit in official relations with the World Health Organization. Email: neil@hifa.org