VHAs providing crucial link between communities & health facilities.
Convergence programme in Nawaeb District, Morobe Province
Twenty-five-year-old Vivienne Holenski is weeks away from giving birth to her third child, but she is keen to complete a training that will allow her to work as a Village Health Assistant (VHA) in her community in Nawaeb District, Morobe Province.
She knows first-hand the daily difficulties pregnant women in her district face with childbirth and wants to make sure these mothers have all the information they need to prepare them for safe delivery in a health facility as well as get all the help they can to safely deliver their babies if they can’t get to a hospital in time.
“With my first child, I didn’t know that I didn’t have enough blood. I was in labour for almost 10 hours. I started calling for the ambulance around 6 PM on the afternoon my pains started until midnight but was unsuccessful. The ambulance came for me at 9:00 AM the next day and took me to Angau hospital in Lae where I delivered my baby,” Vivienne explains.
Her second child, born prematurely at eight months, was delivered at home. The nearest health facility at Boana Station, the headquarters of Nawaeb District, is a 3-hour walk from Guffin where she lives.
“With my first child, I didn’t know that I didn’t have enough blood. I was in labour for almost 10 hours. I started calling for the ambulance around 6 PM on the afternoon my pains started until midnight but was unsuccessful."
Vivienne and her husband, Gatanue, both signed up to be trained as Village Health Assistants under a Convergence Programme that UNICEF is supporting in Nawaeb District, Morobe Province.
They are among 25 other volunteers who are completing an intensive 2-week training supported by UNICEF that will help equip them with important information and skills to provide basic health support to mothers and children.
Vivienne is excited about the safe delivery kits they have just received training on.
‘With this training and what we know about the safe delivery kits, I feel that it is important for us tohave these kits with us at home and help mothers deliver when there is an emergency. I feel that these kits will be useful to mothers who live too far away to even be able to walk to a health facility. If there is no emergency, I will stress to mothers to deliver their babies at the hospital,” she emphasizes.
"With this training and what we know about the safe delivery kits, I feel that it is important for us to have these kits with us at home and help mothers deliver where there is an emergency."
Vivienne and the rest of the volunteers learned about how to use each item in the kit that includes a clean pairs of hand gloves, a sterile blade to cut the cord after delivery, umbilical cord clamp, chlorhexidine gel to be applied to the umbilical stump to prevent infection, an antiseptic eye ointment, medicines to help the mother rebuild her blood, tablet of soap for handwashing after changing diapers, use of toilets and before breastfeeding the baby or eating. and a clean sheet for the pregnant mother to use during labour and delivery.
Trained VHAs like Vivienne are crucial links between the community and health facilities. With proper training, VHAs are upskilled and empowered to provide basic health services for children and women in their communities. With an objective to help increase antenatal attendance at health facilities, immunization coverage and supervised births, their roles include promoting maternal and newborn health, helping families access nutrition and immunisation services and providing guidance and support for supervised and emergency deliveries. They are also trained to facilitate referrals for pregnant mothers from communities to health facilities.
“My husband and I are interested in this training because we’ve done this sort of work before. We received training under the Village Birth Assistants program last year and we helped four pregnant mothers. We organized ambulances for three pregnant women to deliver in the hospital but couldn’t get an ambulance for the fourth mother, so we helped her deliver at home,” she adds.
Nawaeb District is implementing a convergence program. Supported by the Australian Government via the PNGAusPartnership and UNICEF Aotearoa New Zealand and facilitated by UNICEF PNG in collaboration with the Morobe Provincial Administration, the convergence program is a sustainable development strategy aimed at maximizing efficiency and delivering results for children. It is an approach that provides an entry point for strengthening linkages between service delivery platforms and communities.
