Helping Moms Have Safe Deliveries in the Philippines
Project HOPE is training maternity staff from hospitals in the Philippines the PROMPT program to save lives during obstetric emergencies
In the Philippines, women die during childbirth at an alarming rate. The Philippines has not been able to reduce the number of deaths from childbirth as much as other developing countries have over the past few decades. A 2013 study of maternal deaths in the Philippines concluded that, despite the fact that women in labor were reaching a hospital in time, many health facilities are not able to manage serious obstetric complications. The medical staff of these facilities indicated they felt inadequately trained to deal with these emergencies.
Project HOPE is aiming to reduce the number of maternal and infant deaths from childbirth in the Philippines by improving the quality of care for moms in hospitals. Funded by Ferring, the three-year PROMPT (PRactical Obstetric Multi-Professional Training) program is designed for teams of all maternity staff. The program has published evidence of improvement of maternal outcomes in both developed and developing countries. This Project HOPE program is working with eight hospitals in the Philippines and the Philippines Obstetrical and Gynecological Society to achieve its goals.
In September we had an amazingly well attended Day 1 of the PROMPT training program with 100% attendance from our target list of eight hospitals with five team members each. It seems no one wanted to miss this international-caliber training program that Project HOPE is offering to obstetricians, anesthetists, OB residents and supervisory nurses. There were six rotating training drills for the participants in the following topics and scenarios: post-partum hemorrhage, pre-eclampsia, shoulder dystocia, labor room board, sepsis and vaginal breech.
The participants greatly appreciated the teaching methodologies. They gave the PROMPT trainers almost perfect scores in the training assessment. Tomorrow, we will work on how PROMPT will actually be implemented in the hospitals. We will provide critiquing and coaching sessions and a planning session for integrating this team approach to dealing with obstetric emergencies in the hospitals.