Mobile health packages

Malawi is overwhelmed with increased maternal and neonatal mortality rates. Currently, maternal mortality rate stands at 439 per 100000 live births while neonatal mortality rate stands at 27 per 1000 live births. Use of mobile health service packages could be the only way to address the situation. This has the capacity to engage the community to participate in their own health.

Worldwide, 70% of maternal deaths occur due to complications of pregnancy and childbirth while 85% of neonatal deaths occur mainly due to complications of preterm births, asphyxia and infections. Current status in Malawi indicates that maternal mortality rate stands at 439 per 100000 live births while neonatal mortality rate stands at 27 per 1000 live births. The situation is attributed to three delays namely; delay in seeking care, delay in reaching health care and delay in receiving care at a health facility.

To improve community and clinical based interventions, health workers need to view maternal and neonatal health services beyond clinical practice. To achieve this, there is need to use mobile health service packages to keep in touch with the community. Through this, information on benefits of antenatal and hospital delivery, birth preparedness and complication readiness, nutrition, exclusive breastfeeding, danger signs, immunisations and others will be provided through mobile phone text messages. These would act as stimulants to improve health seeking decision making.

The project targets pregnant, postpartum mothers and neonates. Currently interventions to address the situation are mostly hospital based whereby these mothers are encouraged to report to the hospital if danger signs noted. The other way is through use of public address system to disseminate maternal and neonatal health services messages. Meanwhile use of mobile health service packages will ensure that mothers are kept abreast of health related messages hence improving quality of care.

Issues of maternal and neonatal services need workable solutions in order to solve increased mortality rate. As such, there is need to look outside the box in order to improve maternal and neonatal outcomes. Therefore use of mobile text messaging will promote engagement of these mothers in their own health while in the community.