President's Message April 2016
April:
Maternal & Child Health Month
Every day mothers
risk their lives giving birth and millions of children die each year from
treatable, preventable causes.
Maternal and Child
Health Care, is one of Rotary’s Six
Areas of Focus. This means that there are Global Grants available for Clubs
to do projects in this area, and so help alleviate the suffering of mothers and
their children.
CHILD HEALTH CARE
“9 million children under the age of five die each
year due to malnutrition, poor health care, and inadequate sanitation.”
What Projects Can My Club
Do?
Immunizations and
Antibiotics
- Run information sessions for pregnant mothers on the
importance of immunizations.
- Fund information leaflets for mothers on immunizations
and antibiotics.
- Provide immunizations and antibiotics for children
under 5 years old.
- Fund transportation costs for mothers to get to clinics
and health centers to obtain immunizations for their babies.
- Develop and fund a center specializing in providing
immunizations and antibiotics for mothers and children.
Nutrition
- Establish and maintain information sessions encouraging
mothers to breastfeed their babies.
- Establish and maintain public awareness programs on
what constitutes good nutrition, and the importance of good nutrition for
mothers and their children.
- Identify communities with prevalence of underweight
children; provide food baskets for mothers and their children, establish
and maintain information and support programs.
- Fund the production of information sheets promoting different
diets, as well as techniques to prepare and preserve food.
- Promote the inclusion of public nutrition training in
community midwife and nursing education curricula.
Mother to Infant HIV
Transmission
- Establish and maintain information sessions, workshops,
and meetings on how to prevent mother to infant HIV transmission.
- Establish and fund a public awareness and information
campaign about how to prevent mother to infant HIV transmission.
- Establish and fund a programed to give women access to
free or low-cost prenatal care and voluntary HIV testing and counseling.
- Establish and fund the provision of antiretroviral
drugs for mothers, and on-going support and counseling.
- Fund a sustainable Maternal and Child Health HIV
response program to strengthen health and community systems, to tackle the
social determinants of health that drive the epidemic and hinder the
response.
ANTENATAL CARE & CHILDBIRTH
“80% of maternal deaths could be prevented with
access to reproductive health services and trained health care workers”.
What Projects Can My Club
Do?
Maternal Deaths
- Fund the provision of birthing kits to health care
professionals.
- Fund accredited training programs for all grades of
health care professionals.
- Establishing and/or fund a health center that provides
ante and post-natal care, treatment, education and support.
- Establish and fund a public awareness campaign about
available reproductive health services.
- Establish and fund information leaflets, meeting and or
workshops promoting safe motherhood.
Family Planning
“53 million unintended pregnancies could be prevented through family
planning.”
- Fund culturally and religion aware Family Planning
information sheets and resources.
- Establish and fund family planning workshops or
training sessions for family planning health care workers.
- Establish and fund youth health clinics that provide
family planning services, education, information, support, and advocacy
for teenagers.
- Establish and fund public awareness campaign on local
issues related to family planning.
- Establish and fund a high school based sex-education
program.
Vernella Fuller - June, 2013
