Maternal Mortality Reduction Project with PIH

Thank you for supportering Partners In Health's Maternal Mortality Reduction Project in Lesotho. With help from supporters like yourself, Partners In Health Lesotho (PIHL) has succeeded in achieving the following program objectives in its catchment area:

• Increase villagers’ awareness of sexual and reproductive health care services through robust community outreach performed by Maternal Health Workers (MHW).
• Increase women’s access to family planning and reduce the number of high-risk pregnancies.
• Increase the number of pregnant women who go to the health center for an initial comprehensive antenatal care (ANC) visit.
• Reduce the number of women lost to follow-up after their first ANC visit through counselling and accompaniment by MHW.
• Increase the number of pregnant women who know their HIV status and are empowered to make informed choices about care and treatment.
• Increase enrollment in Prevention of Mother to Child Transmission (PMTCT) services for HIV-positive pregnant women (including anti-retroviral treatment (ART) and post-natal prophylaxis as appropriate).
• Increase the number of women who deliver at the health center with assistance from a skilled health care worker.

Through this work, PIHL has successfully scaled up the Maternal Mortality Reduction Project across the entire PIHL network and extended access to health care to many of the most vulnerable women and children in rural Lesotho.

Maternal Health Workers are key to the program’s success – they accompany women throughout their pregnancies, promote testing and treatment for infectious diseases, and ensure attendance at prenatal appointments. Importantly, MHWs also support women and families to make the choice to deliver at a health facility with skilled health professionals, which reduces the risk of maternal and neonatal deaths due to emergency obstetric complications. MHWs continue to receive monthly, performance-based compensation for their work and monthly trainings by PIHL staff. 

Mary (pictured above) is a 37 year old nurse-midwife that has been working with PIHL for ten years. She’s the lead on-site clinician at Tlhanyaku Health Center; she juggles a multitude of medical tasks while simultaneously providing administrative and logistical support to PIHL. The clinic she works at is located in one of the most remote regions – it is three hours from the nearest referral hospital. As Mary explains, “Our country is so mountainous. Doing outreach and home visits to some areas is difficult as the cars cannot reach those areas, hence we travel by horses or on foot.” She and her colleagues are improving health outcomes for women and newborns and catalyzing national system change. The MMRP is delivering real results. As she proudly reports, “Our efforts to stop HIV transmission are well coordinated. From a mother’s first antenatal care visit at which she’s tested for HIV, we accompany families. We provide education and support, and we continue to follow up with them.”