5 February 2015 Isabelle Uny - Maternal Health in Malawi

Thu, Feb 5th 2015 at 12:00 am - 2:00 am

PhD student Isabelle Uny talked about her research project on Maternal Health in Malawi.

l-r Speakers host Russell Wheater, Anna Steen, Isabelle Uny and President Peter Farr

President Peter Farr welcomed members, speaker Isabelle Uny and visitors Peter Williams and Anna Steen to last week's meeting

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Anna will shortly be heading off to Strasbourg as the Club's Euroscola representative. She is very keen on languages and culture and is looking forward to her trip and to meeting with the other 500 or so students who come from across the EU for this 5 day visit. One of the days is spent in the European Parliament where there is a full programme of discussions, presentations and voting on matters relevant to the participants.


Speaker Isabelle Uny, a PhD student at Queen Margaret University in Edinburgh, talked about her research into issues of maternal health in rural communities in Malawi where she had undertaken a study based on three rural village sites with over 160 participants. There is a very high incidence of death in childbirth and while maternal mortality rates have been decreasing steadily, they are still at an unacceptably high rate. A woman in Malawi has a 1 in 36 chance of dying in childbirth compared with 1 in 4700 in the UK.


 Isabelle's study looked at the role of Traditional Birth Attendants (TBAs) who were generally older women with a lot of experience but no formal training. They were effectively banned by legislation in 2007. However, because of the rural population (around 85% of the population lives over 8km distant from the nearest health centre), there are problems with mothers being able to attend and a high proportion give birth at home with little or no support.
The conclusions were that while it was safer to attend a hospital or health centre, or get support from a Skilled Birth Attendant, there were suggestions that the TBAs would be able to provide a useful function in providing a link between the village and the hospital if they were given a redefined role and some further training.


Following a lively series of questions, Russell Wheater gave Isabelle a well-deserved vote of thanks.

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