*Y.C.* Creating Community Maternal Health Workers with Post-Operative Fistula Patients
Julianne
Parker
Yes
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While similar, more small-scale projects are already in place, the potential for training and educating post-operative fistula patients has not been realized. Training and education resources exist, but are not yet fully utilized. My idea would help provide thousands of community health workers quickly, without a significant increase in resources already available.
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Year 1: A significant scale-up of current educational facilities and mechanisms in obstetric fistula units. Possible introduction of additional educators/trainers in hospital and repair centers.
Year 2-3: Follow-up with trainees to ensure that knowledge has been assimilated into action and their communities are now being served.
Since this project would be ongoing with each new wave of fistula patients in the hospital/repair centre, these steps would have to be repeated in a cyclical basis.
Lack of interest or motivation on the part of health workers, nurses, and educators in fistula-treatment facilities and/or fistula patients.
101‐1000
$50 - 100
Yes
Idea phase
Please select
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I have been interested in maternal health, fistula particularly, ever since I read about the Hamlin Hospital in Ethiopia when I was 18. Since then I have made it a goal to gather as much knowledge and information as I could to eventually help change policies in favor of women at risk of injury or death as a result of childbirth.
While completing my Masters in African Studies at Oxford, I concentrated my studies on public health, and conducted an intensive research project in Niger on women suffering from obstetric fistula. While there, simple truths began to emerge and I realized while on the ground that 1. fistula affects all women, not just young girls as is so often popularized in advocacy campaigns, and 2. these women are brave, intelligent, and only lack proper health care and infrastructure. These women were not ignorant, but instead have great knowledge and an in depth understanding of their communities and the problems that impede health.
It was when among those women that I realized they are being underutilized, treated more as ignorant young girls whom Western medicine needs to repair. They are not weak, but rather have an amazing capacity to change their own lievs and those of their communities for the better.
I am a 25 year old passionate feminist, born and raised in Los Angeles, I have now lived all over the world, getting a Masters degree at Oxford with field experience in the Middle East and Southern and West Africa. I currently live in Germany, completing a year-long policy consultancy with UNICEF.
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