Save the Children's programming to improve maternal survival falls within our reproductive health sector and is publicized within our Every Mother, Every Child Campaign. The campaign more broadly focuses on providing mothers with the tools they need to survive and thrive. SC's promotion of maternal health has four major strategies for improving the chances of survival for mothers and newborns: prenatal care including tetanus toxoid immunization,promoting skilled attendance at birth, family planning, and most recently in a partnership with Columbia Unviersity's Averting Maternal Death and Disability Program, improving quality and access to emergency obstetric care (EOC), an area of.
Save the Children has embarked on 2 projects in Mali and Vietnam where hospitals were in fact accessible to community members, but emergency obstetric care was either unavailable or of poor quality. The projects focus on first, improving the quality of emergency obstetric care in district hospitals. Project activities include improving the skills and competence of health care providers, improving conditions at the hospitals, training in and implementation of a quality improvement process, and reviewing and improving data collection at hospitals to ensure that measurement of the results will be possible. After completion of hospital improvements, SC will monitor service utilization data to see if the improved sites are better able to draw in clients. After this monitoring, SC will undertake targeted community mobilization to encourage community members to recognize and refer complications to the newly improved hospitals, allowing documentation of the value added and costs of community mobilization for safe motherhood efforts.
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