Saving Mothers, One at a Time

A good description of a typical health care scenario in Africa...

Sue Makin , the newest contributor to this blog, is an American Presbyterian missionary doctor working at a 190-bed mission hospital in southern Malawi. She has been working in Africa for the past 18 years. According to a 2007 study of global maternal mortality rates, more than two-thirds of deaths among Malawian women of reproductive age are linked to pregnancy or childbirth – a larger proportion than in any of the 171 countries in the study.

In spite of – or maybe, because of – the grim statistics on maternal health here in Malawi, a wonderful part of my job is training younger clinicians who will carry on the work after I have left. The lifesaving skills demonstrated by Sam Matandala, a clinical officer in training at our hospital, were a great encouragement to me last month
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...After she lost consciousness and the midwife grew frightened, the pregnant woman’s relatives loaded her onto a bush-bicycle ambulance and walked with her for about two hours to get to the hospital. She continued to bleed on the journey to the hospital.

As Sam rightly points out, women in Malawi, regardless of age, are not empowered to make decisions about their own health. When they are sick or giving birth, they must wait for their husband or other male relatives to decide when they should be taken to the hospital. This leads to delays – particularly when the decision-making man has gone far away from the village – and many women who come to the hospital at all come late, when complications have already set in.