Life Saving Medical Equipment in Marakwet, Kenya

Thank you for supporting HealthRight International’s Partnership for Maternal and Neonatal Health Plus (PMNH+) project. Please see the attached final report in PDF for summary and pictures.

Our objectives are to improve quality, availability and acceptability of Maternal Newborn Care (MNC) services at the facility level; to expand access to and utilization of MNC services at the community and household level; to increase adoption of healthy behaviors, including appropriate care seeking; and to improve evidence, policy and enabling environment for Maternal and Newborn Health. In addition, the PMNH+ project is one of the pioneering projects to develop response mechanisms or policies to promote respectful maternity care (RMC) in Kenya.

Here are updates on progress of the PMNH+ Project:

• Thanks to medical supply and equipment donation worth nearly $370,000 from Project CURE, the world’s largest provider of donated medical supplies and equipment to developing countries, we were able to distribute the much-needed supplies to partner health facilities according to their need.
• In year 2014, the project funded 20 mobile outreach clinics each month. As a result, 15,022 patients received services through mobile clinics in rural communities.
• PMNH+ team successfully completed trainings for clinical staff from nine health facilities (27 clinical staff for ten days of emergency obstetric care training, 47 clinical staff and managers for three days of RMC training), 1000 community health workers (CHWs), and six community-based organizations. These trainings serve as a basis for the capacity building upon which mentoring and supervision will build.
• After the respectful maternal care training, mid-term household surveys showed that the percentage of women being left alone in the maternity dropped to 2.4% from 4.0%, delivering alone decreased to 1.2% from 2.4%, inappropriate touching decreased to 4.8% from 5.7%, and denial of services due to lack of money decreased to 7.2% from 10.1% at medical facilities.
• From a health systems perspective, year 2014 resulted in better infrastructure through the completion of nine health facility renovations.
• HealthRight received a Family Planning (FP) Integration award through the Advancing Partners and Communities (APC) project. The FP Integration project allows the PMNH+ to expand upon the family planning services available at the facility and community levels and in mobile outreach clinics.

Once again thank you for supporting HealthRight International’s Partnership for Maternal and Neonatal Health Plus (PMNH+) project. The work continues but funding is in short supply. Please share this report and tell your friends and family about our progress. Feel free to continue to follow our progress of PMNH+ project through our website: https://healthright.org/where-we-work/kenya/. 

Links:

• HealthRight International Website

• Final_Report_3.5.15_by_Sophia.pdf (PDF)