JamboMama! offers:
- Access to a modern mobile communication tool for pregnant women living in isolated, poor communities to detect and deal with pregnancy and perinatal complications timely and efficiently.
- A really smart, private mobile phone based network for pregnancy and perinatal surveillance, empowering the women and facilitating the community health workers (CHW) ’s planning, in combination with improved pregnancy and obstetric care from the village level to the obstetric emergency equipped health facility.
- Training of both communities (mothers and community health extension workers) and professional medical staff in use of the app.
- Assess and improve, with active community involvement, access to smartphones, internet and chargers.
JamboMama!’s impact:
Through better coordination and communication:
- Reduction of three key delays that cause maternal death and morbidity: delay in seeking help, delay in getting there, delay in obtaining the right kind of care once arrived at health post.
- Empowerment of women (and their families) in rural areas with a modern coordination, communication and learning tool to understand and manage their pregnancy and childbirth and so make it a safer, healthier and happier experience for all.
- Support for health professionals in their antenatal, intra-natal and postnatal check-ups and care as well as accountability, transparency in their following the protocol (quality control).
How it works as a community programme :
We want to create a worldwide community of practice and knowledge sharing around empowering the most vulnerable women, i.e. pregnant women in remote isolated rural areas, by connecting them to quality health care (information and advice as well as proper care and assistance in pregnancy, childbirth and the first 72 hours after childbirth.)
Connecting women means providing ICT tools such as a smartphone with an application designed for that purpose:
- Register the expectant mothers electronically.
- Transfer their vital data such as blood pressure and urine test results and weight gain through an ICT tool in their own name (password protected).
- Provide them with nutrition, health and life style advice and support, tailored to their special needs (gestational age and health status).
- A constant and efficient reminder/detector of the danger signs in pregnancy.
- Remind the woman timely of her four minimally required antenatal check-ups.
About the app:
Apart from its function of improving the users’ knowledge about pregnancy, what is does to the mother and how the baby develops, it is also is a tool for connecting her with the right person or service at the right time and to start electronic data registraton from the bottom up, with full consent of the mother.
The application gives access to the SAHFA platform where the JamboMama! data bases are kept. There are separate entries for the moms, the medics and the mediators; one for the pregnant and newly delivered woman, one for the healthcare professional and another one for the community health promotor. It will improve the quality of antenatal monitoring by empowering the women and her family so they know what to expect, what should be asked and checked at which stage. It makes the supply side, the health care providers, more accountable both to the women who have expectations as well as to the matrons at a higher level of the medical catchment area who can see what the first line health worker is doing and so guide them better and correct or complete their intervention if needs be.
When she connects on the password protected and consent configured app the expectant mother enters her data and answers questions routinely asked at antenatal check-ups. The data she enters goes to a data base to which has access her referent health provider, the one she selected. She receives information and advice related to the progress of her pregnancy. The certified, registered health professionals who have (password protected) access to the encrypted medical data of their patients, receive a warning if predefined unusual, out of safety range data has been entered by one of their patients.
By reducing the risk of pregnancy and childbirth complications, JamboMama! will help reduce maternal and infant mortality and morbidity.
The main beneficiaries are:
- Pregnant women in developing countries living in medically underserved areas. With pregnancy properly monitored, they’ll be safer, more confident and empowered with relevant information and advice and able to manage their health needs better. With more frequent contact with the healthcare service, the delay in deciding to seek professional help will be reduced, whether by phone or actually going to the health centre.
- Unborn children, as a great number of stillbirths and birth defects will be detected and avoided, and they will be welcomed by their own mother at birth.
- The baby’s siblings, who can be nurtured by their own mother.
- All women of reproductive age in the district and beyond, as JamboMama! allows for the anonymous treatment of maternal health data that are normally inaccessible, thus leading to better informed mother and child healthcare policies.
The introduction of the application is an opportunity to strengthen coordination and awareness around pregnancy and childbirth at the individual and the community level, starting at the rural dispensary and, through the dispensary, the healthcare system. The process of introducing the app and collecting the baseline data required to make it an effective community coordination tool for pregnancy surveillance is an integral part of JamboMama! project development and pilot implementation.
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