Anne M. Austin and Kate Mitchell are the two most recent additions to the Maternal Health Task Force team. Anne will lead the MHTF’s new research, monitoring and evaluation efforts as Deputy Director for Research, Monitoring and Evaluation, while Kate will keep the MHTF’s cutting-edge knowledge management system content-rich and timely as the Managing Editor.

Born in Indonesia to a Norwegian mother and American father, and raised in Nigeria, Kenya and Saudi Arabia, Anne Austin brings a personal and professional global perspective to the MHTF. She holds a BA from Emory University, a MPH from the Rollins School of Public Health, and a ScD from the Harvard School of Public Health’s in Global Health and Population Studies and was named a Pritzker Fellow two years in a row.

Anne has conducted extensive research in areas that make her exceptionally well-suited to lead the MHTF’s innovative implementation research agenda on the quality of maternal health care. Her technical and analytical skills will enable the MHTF to contribute significantly to the global challenge of systematizing proven interventions to improve maternal health outcomes especially in high-burden settings. Among her studies, Anne has looked at maternal and child health trends in Egypt, analyzed global policy approaches to child nutrition, analyzed couple concordance on attitudes towards abortion and knowledge of abortion, and managed a unique CDC study on the prevention of malaria in pregnancy.

Kate returns to the MHTF where she began as a Knowledge Management Assistant in the project’s first phase, cataloguing and tagging the first on-line library exclusive to maternal health as well as helping to establish and populate the MHTF’s social media platforms. She left the MHTF when she was named a Clinton Fellow at the America India Foundation. Over the course of year, she worked in Jamshedpur, Jharkhand and Kolkata in West Bengal investigating the implementation of the Janani Suraksha Yojana conditional cash transfer program. She also designed and facilitated workshops for community health workers on community involvement in maternal and newborn health programs. Kate runs her own maternal health blog and is a frequent contributor to others. She holds a BA from Florida International University and an MPH from Boston University School of Public Health.

The MHTF is pleased to welcome Anne Austin, and to welcome back Kate Mitchell to the team! To learn more about Anne, Kate and the rest of the MHTF staff, click here.

The Safe Motherhood Program at the University of California, San Francisco is looking for two interns: one office intern to be based in the San Francisco office and one field intern to be based in the Copperbelt region of Zambia.

1.) UCSF Safe Motherhood Office Intern, San Francisco – Summer 2012

The focus of this internship is to prepare presentations for an upcoming international conference in order to effectively show the latest data on the non-pneumatic anti-shock garment (NASG) for obstetric hemorrhage clinical trial.  The intern will also gain some experience in handling and cleaning a large data set.

For more information on the trial please visit www.lifewrap.org and http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00488462.

Duties:

• Assist with data cleaning and analyses for the international trial for the non-pneumatic anti-shock garment (NASG) for obstetric hemorrhage
• Prepare multiple Power Point presentations to include data for an upcoming international conference
• Other light administrative duties as required

Qualifications:

• Excellent Power Point and writing skills are a must!
• Knowledge of STATA, SPSS, Word, Excel.
• Experience with online data systems is a plus.

Start date: June 1, 2012.

Duration: 12 weeks, 40 hrs/week

Note: This internship is unpaid.

Please send CV, cover letter and a writing sample to Jennifer Clark at jclark@globalhealth.ucsf.edu.

Please apply by 2/15 to be considered for initial screening.

2.) UCSF Safe Motherhood Zambia Field Intern – Summer 2012

The focus of this internship is to support the Zambia team of the non-pneumatic anti-shock garment (NASG) trial.  The study aims to reduce maternal mortality and morbidities in Zambia and Zimbabwe caused by obstetric hemorrhage.  This is a cluster randomized control study which compares outcomes based on evidence from intervention and control clinics.  The intervention clinics in this study are the clinics that are using the NASG as a first aid device for patients suffering from hypovolemic shock caused by bleeding during pregnancy.

For more information on the trial please visit www.lifewrap.org and http://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00488462.

Duties:

• Provide logistical support for the local Zambian team – distributing supplies, copies, etc
• Review data collection forms
• Encourage protocol adherence
• Conduct training with local hospital and clinic staff
• Visit the study clinics
• Follow up on cases
• Liaise with the San Francisco office and the in-country staff

Qualifications:

• Experience in international settings
• Interest in maternal health
• Research experience
• Familiarity with clinical environments
• Must be highly detail-oriented, organized and have excellent follow-through skills

Start Date: May 30, 2012

Duration: 12 weeks, 40 hours/week

Note: Candidates are expected to secure outside funding to cover roundtrip airfare and living expenses for the duration of the internship.

Please send cv, cover letter and a writing sample to Jennifer Clark at jclark@globalhealth.ucsf.edu.

Please apply by 2/15 to be considered for initial screening!

View past intern experiences on our intern blog: http://lifewrapinterns.wordpress.com/.

Today, Bill Gates published his annual letter, which this year focuses on improving the lives of the poorest of the poor through innovations in agriculture and promoting global health issues, including vaccines, polio, HIV/AIDS, and family planning.

On family planning, Gates writes:

Globally, more than 200 million women say they don’t want to have a child within the next two years but aren’t using contraceptives. If families that wanted to wait a longer period between births or have fewer children had access to the right tools, two things would happen. First, those families would have an easier time facing the challenges of poverty. Second, as national population growth rates came down gradually, governments would be able to better meet the needs of all their people.

 

A significant number of women indicate that they would use modern family planning tools if they were available. Unfortunately, the funding to buy these tools, to make them cheaper, and to provide high-quality information to poor families has been lacking.

In a recent blog post, Ana Langer, Director of the Maternal Health Task Force (MHTF) at the Women and Health Initiative (W&HI) at Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH), explained that the MHTF partners have been “virtually unanimous in calling for more educational opportunities for those interested in maternal health”.

The W&HI and the MHTF are meeting this call to provide more educational opportunities in a number of different ways—including scholarships for maternal health professionals in developing countries to attend scientific and technical meetings, a reiteration of the Young Champions for Maternal Health fellowship program, and the Field Experience in Maternal Health winter session course for graduate students at the Harvard School of Public Health.

The concept of the Field Experience in Maternal Health winter session course is to link highly trained and motivated HSPH graduate students with MHTF partner organizations working in developing countries–creating a “win-win” situation. Based on the needs of the organizations and the skills of the students, students are paired with organizations to spend three weeks working on a focused project during the January winter session. The course provides students with an opportunity to apply their skills and knowledge to maternal health issues in countries facing complex maternal health challenges. Examples of student projects include collecting data, conducting site visits and interviews, completing a needs assessment, developing a draft proposal or report, or launching a new activity or service. As a result of this collaboration, the partner organization projects are strengthened and a young professional gains  important experience working in the field of maternal health.

The first cohort of Harvard School of Public Health Field Experience in Maternal Health winter session students has just completed their field assignments. See below for a list of their placement countries and host organizations!

• Dada Adedayo and Olalekan Akanbi were placed in India with The Center for Development and Population Activities.
• Annie Kearns was placed in India with the International MotherBaby Childbirth Organization.
• Aparna Chandrasekhar was placed in Ethiopia with IntraHealth International, Inc.
• Megan Loucks was placed in Kenya with Jacaranda Health.
• Elena Chopyak was placed in Mali with Medic Mobile.
• Hannah Ratcliffe, Ibraheem Abioye, and Maura Fulton were placed with the Population Council in their Bangladesh, Ghana, and Kenya offices.

To learn more about the students’ work at their various project sites, check back soon! Over the next couple of weeks, the students will be sharing photos, stories, and lessons from their field assignments here on the MHTF Blog.

If you are a graduate student at Harvard School of Public Health and are interested in applying for the Field Experience in Maternal Health winter session next year, visit the Women and Health Initiative site in August 2012 for information on how and when to apply. You can also subscribe to the MHTF Blog and we will be sure to update you. (Just enter your email address in the right panel and click subscribe!)

If your organization is interested in hosting a Harvard School of Public Health graduate student next winter, please fill out this form and return it to Elizabeth Claise at eclaise@hsph.harvard.edu.

The progress made on maternal health since the creation of the Millennium Development Goals has been uneven both between and within countries. However, the data coverage, particularly for maternal mortality ratios (MMR), within countries cannot always tells us the full story.

India’s MMR decreased by nearly 60% between 1990 and 2008 according to UN data. However, some estimates suggest that certain populations have an MMR over twice its country-wide MMR of 230 maternal death per 100,000 live births. A new paper published this month in BMC Public Health explores maternal experience of marginalized women in Karnataka, India.

Adamson et al. write:

This population-based study found that institutional deliveries in rural areas of Mysore District had increased from 51% to 70% between the years of 2002 and 2008. Additionally, it showed that while significantly more mothers were seeking antenatal care and delivering in institutional settings, large disparities continued to exist in the uptake of maternal health services among different castes. Mothers belonging to OBC or general castes were almost twice as likely to have an institutional birth as compared to SC/ST

The deadline of February 6th. is fast approaching to submit abstracts for the American Public Health Association’s Annual Meeting. This year’s meeting will be held in San Francisco, CA in October 2012.

Last year’s conference in Washington featured a number of sessions on maternal and child health.

Visit APHA’s Annual Meeting website to learn more about presenting and attending this year’s meeting.

Written by: Marissa Yeakey, Population Reference Bureau

The Policy Communication Fellows program at the Population Reference Bureau provides participants with an understanding of how research can inform social policy, and a detailed knowledge of different approaches to communicating research findings to non-specialists. It begins with a two-week workshop held at PRB, during which participants learn about how research influences the policy process and how to communicate research effectively. During the 2012-2013 academic year, participants will prepare several policy-oriented research briefs, one of which they will present at a workshop prior to the 2013 Population Association of America (PAA) Annual Meeting.

We are accepting applications from citizens of developing countries that plan to return to their home countries upon completion of their doctoral studies. Candidates accepted into the Policy Fellows program will be provided with travel, lodging, and per diem associated with the Washington and PAA workshops, PAA registration costs, as well as a $2,000 research stipend. The program is currently funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and for this reason we can only accept candidates that come from developing countries where USAID provides population and family planning funding (visit our recruitment page online for a complete list of eligible countries).

The deadline to apply to PRB’s Policy Communication Fellows program is Thursday, February 2, 2012. The fellowship information and application details in the attachments can also be found on our website. This program is an excellent opportunity for PhD students in demography, family planning, reproductive health, and related fields to learn more about translating their research into policy.

Please contact me at policyfellows2012@prb.org with any questions you may have about the program.

This week on the MHTF blog:

1. Are there negative aspects to involving men?
2. Jacaranda Health involves mothers in designing care
3. mothers2mothers reports on their Active Client Follow-Up project
4. The launch of Global Motherhood on the Huffington Post

Some reading for the weekend:

1. Young Champion Zubaida Bai featured on Women Deliver’s blog
2. New estimates of induced abortion rates
3. Traditional birth attendants as a resource in child birth

Johnson & Johnson (who recently also launched Text4Baby) and the Huffington Post have teamed up to create a new section in the Huffington Post. Global Motherhood will serve as a platform for discussion and learning on the issues that mothers face during pregnancy and childbirth.

Arianna Huffington writes:

Global Motherhood will go beyond matters of physical health to address the full spectrum of issues affecting mothers and their babies, with a special focus on the dangers faced by pregnant women in underdeveloped countries and the guilt and fear that accompany childbirth for many women.

 

It will also be a place to share our personal stories. I lost my first baby five months into my pregnancy, and as a result I spent my next pregnancy terrified that I would lose this baby, too. In fact, I was so afraid that, even though I was thirty-eight, I refused to have amniocentesis because it carried a tiny risk of miscarriage. Instead, I simply prayed that my baby would be healthy. And as my children grew, the dangers that threatened them — and even those that I perceived as threatening them — seemed to multiply. I’m also convinced that when they take the baby out, they put the guilt in, especially if you are a working mother juggling children and work. And of course, when we keep our feelings of vulnerability, guilt and insecurity to ourselves, they only grow in the dark.

Written by: Emily Puckart, Program Associate, MHTF

mothers2mothers (m2m) broadly works to enhance the delivery and success of prevention of mother to child transmission of HIV (PMTCT) services. By employing HIV-positive peer educators, m2m seeks to boost the effectiveness and uptake of PMTCT services by women. However, drop off in participation in PMTCT services prevents women from interacting with an m2m Mentor Mother who can deliver support on a variety of health topics and increase women’s usage of PMTCT services. Focused on reducing the number of women who do not participate in PMTCT services, m2m has explored the idea of Active Client Follow-Up (ACFU) in order to follow up with clients who have stopped participating in key services. During their pilot study, m2m considered a number of ACFU tactics including text messages, home visits, and phone calls to clients.

Supported by the Elton John AIDS Foundation and the MHTF, m2m conducted a four-country pilot program focused on exploring scale up and integration of ACFU into m2m settings and activities. Working on pilots in Lesotho, Malawi, Swaziland, and Zambia, m2m focused on determining the “acceptability, feasibility, and effectiveness of different ACFU tactics and approaches.”

Organizations interested in methods to integrate mHealth and HIV/AIDS activities into their broader maternal health programs, will likely find m2m’s pilot results useful in planning their own activities. For example, some interesting findings from the pilot project highlighted in m2m’s report include:

• Cell phones and home visits to follow up clients are relatively inexpensive methodologies to improve client retention in PMTCT, at an average cost of US$0.27 per phone call and US$0.96 per hour spent on home visit. As per m2m’s ACFU guidelines, Mentor Mothers’ spent minimal time on the phone or in the home, focusing purely on the delivering the message that the client should return to the facility because of a missed appointment.
• ACFU was found to be an effective approach across different types of settings (urban, rural, high volume, low volume), indicating its scalability and adaptability to the diverse settings in which m2m currently work.
• Clients’ consent and preference for ACFU tactics varied across and within countries, indicating the need for m2m to employ a multi-tactic approach to implementing ACFU. Clients’ preference for different ACFU tactics reflected the varying levels of cell phone access, penetration and ownership3 in the different settings.

To read more about the findings from m2m’s four-country pilot please read their report “Improving Client Retention in the PMTCT Cascade through Active Client Follow-Up (ACFU)“