Steps Towards Improvement In Mother And Child Health

Steps Towards Improvement In Mother And Child Health

By:


Motherhood is the most important and joyous part of a womans life, but despite so much progress in healthcare systems across the world, safeguarding the health of mothers and children is still one of the worlds most urgent priorities. Every year in developing countries, millions of mothers and babies die during childbirth or in the first month of their life. These deaths can be prevented initiating behavioral changes in maternal and child health by empowering people especially those living in rural areas and urban slums with right information and giving access to proper health services.

In many instances across different countries in the world especially in the developing and underdeveloped countries, providing proper awareness and access to information should start from adolescence about care during pregnancy, safe delivery and post-natal care, these steps can go a long way in ensuring better maternal and child health.

Although maternal and infant mortality rates in India have come down significantly over the years because of better health services and government schemes like NRHM (National Rural Health Mission), however the morbidity rates have not shown much improvement. Many expecting mothers have poor nutritional status and anemia which in turn affects the health of the neonate. It may seem easy to follow simple practices, such as regular check-ups during pregnancy, breastfeeding and taking care of a newborn however, these are rarely followed by majority of population, who many a time take pregnancy for granted and therefore end up jeopardizing maternal and child health.

In rural India this issue poses more difficult challenge; expecting mothers in poverty-ridden areas have insufficient food and are thus malnourished, anemic and many a times repeated pregnancies compound this problem further. In such areas, Pre-natal care including awareness drives, promoting institutional deliveries or delivery under the guidance of a trained midwife needs to be promoted. Local dais should be given periodic training and should be imparted with basic and timely information regarding antiseptic and other important measures to conduct safe deliveries and stress should be laid on imparting important information to pregnant female or lactating mother and her family.

Another problem that we face in India is the skewed sex ratio and female infanticide is still a harsh reality. With recent advances in investigative techniques like ultrasound, sex determination before birth is possible and abortion of female fetuses is widely prevalent. Also, neonates are often killed after birth. Further, the neglect of the girl child is prevalent in many families and there is clear disparity between the nutrition and care given to male and female children. The girl child, who is going to be a mother in future, starts her life with poor health; and needs to be nurtured at par with the male child. These problems also need to be addressed simultaneously.

Fortis Foundation with support from Fortis Healthcare facilities is situated in different states of India and doing its bit in ensuring maternal and child health well being and changing the alarming trends not only in rural areas but in urban areas as well.

About the Author:
Fortis Foundation started a Women Health NGOs in India to help bridge this gap in Maternal and Child Health.It aims at looking at various issues from encouraging spacing in births to providing pre and ante-natal care to females to creating awareness on nutrition, breastfeeding, immunization and many more issues.



Article Originally Published On: http://www.articlesnatch.com


Tags: ,

|

Loading...
Related....
Videos...

Recent Health Articles

Comments

Still can't find what you are looking for? Search for it!

Loading

Site Navigation:

Copyright 2005-2011 ArticleSnatch, LLC - All Rights Reserved.
Privacy Policy | Terms of Service.