Continuum of Care
Care for adolescent girls should aim to:
- Improve nutrition
- Discourage early marriages and childbearing
- Provide opportunities for female education and literacy
- Reduce the work burden on young girls and women
- Vaccinate adolescent girls against tetanus
Care for pregnant women should aim to:
- Improve pregnant women’s nutrition through diet and nutritional support
- Detect and treat infections, especially syphilis and malaria
- Provide tetanus toxoid vaccination
- Detect and treat pregnancy complications such as pre-eclampsia and bleeding
- Provide counselling to encourage a safe birth and exclusive breastfeeding
Key interventions at the time of birth should include:
- Skilled attendance at every delivery using appropriate and evidence-based practices
- Ensure a clean delivery with clean hands and equipment, dry and wrap the baby
- Initiate exclusive breastfeeding as soon as possible after the birth
- Avoid delay in seeking care and referral
- Provide extra care if needed to resuscitate asphyxiated babies
Care after birth should aim to:
- Provide continued counselling and support for exclusive breastfeeding
- Ensure that the baby is kept warm and with the mother, especially important for low-birthweight babies
- Ensure hygiene through clean cord care and hand-washing
- Advise on the importance of immunisation
- Recognise danger signs, seek help if necessary and treat neonatal infections early
Saving Lives
Over a quarter of a million women and three million newborn babies die each year in pregnancy and childbirth or soon afterwards, the majority of them in Africa and South Asia. For every woman who dies at least twenty more suffer complications which leave them with lifelong disability and pain.
Our unique programmes are saving the lives of mothers and babies every day. We need you to help us to equip women with their most vital survival tool: knowledge.
