South Tongu adopts health volunteers project; To improve maternal health
The South Tongu District Health Directorate, in partnership with Grameen Foundation, a non-governmental organisation with focus on health, has launched the Community Mobihealth Volunteer project at Asidowui, a community in the South Tongu District in the Volta Region.
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The project is aimed at employing the use of mobile tools to help frontline community health volunteers establish credibility in their communities as health workers.
That would empower them to effectively persuade and convince pregnant women and their families to utilise maternal health services even when they conflicted with their customs and myths.
Human intermediaries and mobile technology
Speaking at the launch of the project, the South Tongu District Director of Health Services, Ms Ellen Sarpong-Akorsah, said the project was using human intermediaries and mobile technology to help pregnant women and mothers listen to and adopt the healthy behaviours promoted by Mobile Midwife, an existing health communication technology.
She said the MobiHealth volunteers were trained and equipped with a mobile health tool to recognise danger signs in the pregnant woman or newborn, and were able to use the mobile phone to send pre-composed messages to their community nurses, alerting them of the need to follow up in the home.
Mr Alfred Yeboah, the Project Leader, said through the MobiHealth volunteer initiative, community health nurses and their trained volunteers were improving how they worked as a team to ensure that pregnant women and infants got the health care they needed, especially during the critical delivery and newborn period.
He said 21 MobiHealth volunteers were now active in many communities and four of these volunteers were traditional birth attendants.
The MobiHealth volunteers, he said, had been equipped to use audio-visual aids as they shared health information in the local language with their pregnant clients and lactating mothers during home visits.
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Preventing maternal, infant death
The Country Director of Grameen Foundation-Ghana, Ms Karen Romano, said she was hopeful that through the work of the MobiHealth volunteers and their community health nurses, more women could access life-saving care to prevent maternal and infant death.
Ms Romano observed that giving incentives and motivating health volunteers was a challenge for the health system.
Volunteering, she said, was hard work that did not put food on the table, stressing that frontline health volunteers often lost motivation after some time.
Incentives for volunteers
To help address this problem, she said, Grameen Foundation was working with the district and with Expo Social Marketing to also equip the MobiHealth volunteers as social marketing agents in selling Aquatab water purification tablets to improve the quality of water in remote communities.
That, she said, was expected to provide an opportunity to enable the volunteers to raise some income that could help motivate them to keep volunteering over longer periods of time.
Ms Romano expressed appreciation to the Ghana Health Service, the Volta Regional Directorate, and the South Tongu District leadership for their partnership and for their courage to be innovators in the use of mobile technology to improve maternal and newborn health care in Ghana.