By Jenny Holl | Administrative Manager
Despite unforseen weather challenges this year, we continue to make progress on our birthing center upgrades in Dolpa. The extreme weather has made travel to the sites of our birthing center projects even more difficult than usual. There are no roads in the entire district of Dolpa and therefore, all equipment and construction materials must be delivered by plane, helicopter, or carried to the site on the backs of yak or mule caravans. Due to rain, it has been unsafe for helicopters and planes to make landings in the area and trips by pack animals have been heavily delayed due to dangerous conditions.
However, our teams are up to the challenge! We have had better luck in Phoksundo than in Saldang, and we have finally completed construction at the Ringmo (Phoksundo) birthing center site. We expect to have the necessary medical equipment delivered and set up before the year's end. We have gotten price quotes and are in the process of purchasing delivery beds, infant warmers, dopplers, and a variety of medical devices to provide preventative, delivery and emergency obstetric care and newborn care at the newly upgraded birthing centers.
Saldang, the more remote of the two locations, has proven a bit more arduous, and as such, construction materials have just arrived. Construction should be underway shortly and we are hoping that all structural work will be completed by the end of the year as well.
Over the past several months, we also completed monitoring and evaluation on the implementation of the Childbirth and Newborn Care Package (CBNCP) in which we train all Female Community Health Volunteers (FCHV). Our team visited 18 health facilities and spoke with more than 100 FCHV, making this the largest follow-up of its kind ever to have been done in Dolpa, where travelling on foot can be a challenge to completing such a task. This feat is encouraging for future work in the district, as it shows that comprehensive monitoring and evaluation is possible in the region with the right amount of determination and hard work! We are setting the bar high for our teams and for other NGOs working in Dolpa. In addition, we participated in a three-day district level review of the CBNCP program. All of the health workers from peripheral level health institutions were part of the review process. We had an open discussion regarding the major bottle necks to the program's success in addition to skill refreshers. Our team reports that it was very fruitful to have representatives of all the health facilities update their knowledge and skills as well as provide feedback on the progress and impact of the program.
Our team also had the opportunity to present our work in Dolpa at the Annual District Project Advisory Committee Meeting. Many high ranking officials from the government were present, who praised our vision to work in remote locations such as Dolpa where many other organizations are hesitant to work at the moment. They provided us with valuable suggestions and asked for our assistance not only in continuing to improve the Maternal and Child Health sector in Dolpa, but also the development of health as a whole, which is of course something to strive for!
I should also mention that this month marks one of the biggest festivals of the year in Nepal - Happy Dashain!
Thank you for all of the continued support.
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