Pakistan: Short Training for Women Workers Goes Far in Saving Newborns’ Lives

A new study suggests that “lady health workers,” as Pakistan calls them — women trained as part of a government program to give care to poor people in rural areas — can make a difference in saving the lives of newborns.
Researchers from Aga Khan University in Karachi followed almost 50,000 households in two health districts for two years. The areas where the women were assigned to work had 21 percent fewer stillbirths and 15 percent fewer newborn deaths than in other areas. That success was achieved even though the health workers generally had only 10th-grade educations and one extra week of training for the project. Also, they failed to hold almost half the planned group sessions for pregnant women and visited only a quarter of the babies within a day of birth.

The workers advised pregnant women to go to clinics for checkups and vitamins, and to give birth at clinics. They handed out “birth kits” with soap and clean razors to reduce the chance that cutting the umbilical cord would transmit tetanus. They instructed the widely used professional midwives, known as dais, in skills like getting newborns to breathe and giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. And they asked the dais to encourage mothers to keep premature babies warm instead of washing them in cold water, and to breast-feed them immediately.