Education for Empowerment and Change - Perinatal Mortality 50% lower
Strategy researched Information and education for empowerment and change (IEEC) for women and their husbands, training of birth attendants, and provision of telecommunication and transportation services for women Impact achieved Country of study Pakistan Research methodology Community randomized trial; 32 village clusters, 900 households, 2,561 pregnant women Journal Reproductive Health; 2010 Journal paper title and link Excerpt from Abstract "Pregnant women in intervention clusters received prenatal care and prophylactic iron therapy more frequently than pregnant women in control clusters. Providing safe motherhood education to husbands resulted in further improvement of some indicators. There was a small but significant increase in percent of hospital deliveries but no impact on the use of skilled birth attendants. Perinatal mortality reduced significantly in clusters where only wives received information and education in safe motherhood. The survey to assess residual impact showed similar results." |
Comments
The key to success may be another
It is interesting, in this intervention where second and third generation facilitators were generated, to determine how important the educational content was in relation to the development of an autonomous process in the communities that reproduced, regardless of the project developers, the knowledge and attitudes necessary in a wider range of the population. What was it that led to such broad community engagement with the initiative?
Was it formative research and development group involvement deep and effective?
Was it a symbolic transformation of the booklet, for some profound reason, into an object of community value?
Is the motivation to be a facilitator for personal reasons or does it derive from a specific social context?
What were the main reasons for it to become a process that is reproduced autonomously by the community?
This and other magnificent questions arise from this study and lead us to think that perhaps the central value in effective-based community health interventions (following a Parsonian logic) is the development of a level of autonomy that allows development in local terms.
Sources for Behavioural effects
Perinatal mortality reduced significantly due to educational initiatives would benefit by more detail on what type of information and education in safe motherhood wives received. More contextual detail may provide a more convincing argument on why these behaviors were achieved as it appears skilled birth attendants had no impact on mortality rates while the information and education did.