UM and Zuyd University contribute to professional development of midwives in Sierra Leone
Maastricht University in cooperation with Zuyd University of Applied Sciences will support the continuous professional development for midwives in Sierra Leone, West Africa, through a renewed cooperation with the School of Midwifery in Makeni, a town located in the central part of the country. The new project will contribute to (re)building a strong and effective health workforce in rural and urban Sierra Leone. The intended long term effect is to improve maternal and child health and health care specifically in the poorer parts of the country, where most of the targeted midwives are working.
Sierra Leone has among the world’s highest rates of maternal and child mortality and still a rather poor maternal and child health status. Midwifery care in rural Sierra Leone is still inadequate. Improving maternal care is essential to improve mother and child health outcomes. Rural maternal care is mainly delivered by midwives who are trained by the School of Midwifery Makeni (SOMM). This school provides both initial and continued training for midwives. The current training project targets the Continuous Professional Development (CPD) of midwives. This will be done by training the SOMM teaching staff in how to develop and deliver better continuous training to practicing midwives. An important element in the programme will be how midwives can learn how to collect and process data on their current practice, in order to improve the care delivered.
The staff of SOMM will be trained in several modules by a team consisting of experts from Zuyd’s Academy for Midwifery (AVM) and Maastricht University’s Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences. The project will run during one year, from mid 2017 until mid 2018. Mundo will co-ordinate and manage the project.
The project will be funded with 75,000 Euros through the NFP TMT programme, a programme financed by the Dutch government in the framework of the Dutch development cooperation effort and administered by Nuffic. The NFP programme targets among other priorities the health sector, specifically the improvement of sexual and reproductive health and rights.
For more information about this project you can contact ms Annechien Deelman at Mundo, tel. 043 3883582, annechien.deelman@maastrichtuniversity.nl
Photo bobthemagicdragon | Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
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