Are you interested in becoming an HMS trainer?

Supporting Safe Birth, Inc. is sponsoring a training opportunity on Helping Mothers Survive Bleeding After Birth Complete (BABC) day 1 ONLY and Essential Care for Labor & Birth (ECL&B) modules. This opportunity is scheduled for April 4 – 5, 2020 in Madison, Wisconsin. Secure your spot today!

To apply, please visit the Supporting Safe Birth website: https://supportingsafebirth.org/trainings/

The HMS PE&E module is delivered over two days with Day 1 dedicated for any provider who may care for pregnant, laboring, or postpartum women and must be able to rapidly diagnose and treat pre-eclampsia at any level of the health system. Day 2 is designed specifically to build capacity of skilled birth attendants who work in referral facilities with the capacity to provide care for ongoing management of women with severe pre-eclampsia and eclampsia.

Project C.U.R.E. is providing a training of Master Trainers in March 2019 for HMS-Pre-Eclampsia & Eclampsia module and will take place in Denver, CO (currently sold out). Please visit the Project C.U.R.E. website for more information: https://projectcure.org/programs/helping-mothers-survive.

Onsite trainings that feature shortened, simulation-based lessons with support for practice led to a 17% decrease in postpartum hemorrhage, a 47% decrease in retained placenta, a 34% decrease in stillbirth and a 62% decrease in newborn death across 125 public facilities in Uganda.

“Traditional training approaches have not worked,” lead author Cherrie Evans says, referring to in-service workshops taught by outside experts to large groups gathered for a week or more in hotel conference rooms across sub-Saharan Africa. “Skills are taught and competencies are ‘learned,’ in so far as the attendees pass tests at the end of these events. But the literature shows that this strategy has not meaningfully changed how health care providers care for people day in and day out and, as a result, haven’t impacted survival when mothers hemorrhage or babies fail to breathe at birth.”

The study authors worked with the Ugandan Ministry of Health to move lessons onsite, shorten training sessions, and put midwives’ own peers (in this case, local Ugandan staff) in charge of leading short, simulation-based practice after training. Using the Bleeding after Birth and Helping Babies Breathe training modules, they tested the approach in Western and Eastern Uganda that lasted from January 2014 to October 2015.

A total of 755 midwives, nurses and doctors were trained in 125 facilities covering more than 70,000  births. “The evidence shows that if providers learn with the team they work with, in the setting where they work, they are more likely to change their practices and maintain skills and competencies well after the training is over,” says Evans, DrPH, a senior maternal and newborn health advisor at Jhpiego where she directs Helping Mothers Survive.

“This important study advances our understanding around the most critical question confronting global health today—understanding how provider performance can be sustainably improved,” says Thomas F. Burke, MD, Chief of Global Health and Human Rights, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School. “Dr. Evans and team teach us that critical elements of state-of-the art implementation efforts should include: “light touch, rapid cycling, and team training.”

Reducing maternal and newborn death rates in developing countries depends on marshalling a skilled, competent health workforce and, as critical, a strong health system. The latter, however, requires a series of fixes across a variety of categories—supply chains, data collection, and infrastructure—that take time.

“While we wait for enough funding to strengthen entire health systems, we can significantly increase newborn survival and prevent maternal complications with just this very simple, inexpensive training intervention that builds caregiver confidence and competence, and ultimately improves performance,” Evans says.

Peer-assisted learning after onsite, low-dose, high-frequency training and practice on simulators to prevent and treat postpartum hemorrhage and neonatal asphyxia: A pragmatic trial in 12 districts in Uganda was written by Cherrie Lynn Evans, Eva Bazant, Innocent Atukunda, Emma Williams, Susan Niermeyer, Cyndi Hiner, Ryan Zahn, Rose Namugerwa, Anthony Mbonye, Diwakar Mohan.

Funding was provided by Saving Lives at Birth partners: United States Agency for International Development (USAID); Government of Norway; Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation; Grand Challenges Canada, and the UK Government.

The Helping Mothers Survive team traveled to Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Tanzania this summer to support the International Confederation of Midwives (ICM) to launch their 50, 000 Happy Birthdays project.  Working with country midwifery associations, educators and other partners, Jhpiego conducted Training of Trainers for Bleeding after Birth Complete (BABC) and Pre-Eclampsia & Eclampsia (PE&E) using the low-dose, high-frequency (LDHF) approach to learning. Below is a short summary of what we accomplished in each country.

KIGALI, RWANDA (August 2018)

The HMS team worked with Jhpiego country staff in partnership with the Rwanda Association of Midwives (RAM). And 50K HBD project manager, Fidele Nkurunziza. We trained a total of 61 midwives, nurses, doctors, and clinical officers in both HMS BABC and HMS PE&E.  Of those trained in the first round, 10 were selected to be mentored while training their first group of participants.

ADDIS ABABA, ETHIOPIA (September 2018)        

In Ethiopia, we built the capacity of a smaller group of trainers working with the Ethiopia Midwives Association (EMwA) and the project manager for 50K HBD, Tachawt Salilih.  Six were EMwA trainers for the 50K HBD project, one was a Dutch physician who was working in Northern Ethiopia, and one was a physician from Cameroonian M.D who will be implementing HMS in West Africa through UNFPA.

Six participants were mentored during their first training of 18 additional candidate trainers in HMS PE&E to start the scale-up of the 50K HBD project.

MWANZA & GEITA, TANZANIA (September/October 2018)

The HMS team worked with Jhpiego staff from the Boresha Afya (BA) project to train midwives from the Tanzania Midwives Association (TAMA) including Lucy Mabada, project manager of 50K HBD. For this event, 14 Master trainers were trained from the Geita, Tanga, and Katavi regions. Of the 14, five candidate trainers were mentored during their first training of 24 providers in Geita. In week 3, the newly mentored trainers offered training to begin rolling out HMS BABC and PE&E to all 132 Facilities in Geita and selected facilities in Tanga and Katavi regions.

To apply, please visit the Project C.U.R.E. website at https://projectcure.org/programs/helping-mothers-survive.