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Midwife Training Program: Introduction

Sept 21, 2001

Dear Friends of the Kham Aid Foundation,

In just a few weeks we're starting a new program to improve health care and reduce infant mortality in remote Tibetan areas. Ten women from Yajiang (Nyachuka) County in western Sichuan have been chosen to take part in a five week course that will teach them the basics of caring for women during pregnancy and delivery. The trainees will also learn elementary health care for babies and young children.

The course will start on October 8, 2001. The instructors are eight doctors at the Maternity and Child Care Hospital of Ganzi Prefecture. The program was designed by them in cooperation with the Women's Federation of Ganzi Prefecture. It was the Women's Federation who requested that we create this program. Thanks to the generosity of an anonymous sponsor, their request is being granted.

In such extremely poor areas as Yajiang County, people live far from hospitals, are loathe to spend money on medical care, and will often wait until the situation becomes desperate before making the trek to town to find a doctor. Thus, lives are lost unnecessarily.

While five weeks is hardly enough to train professional obstetricians, it is enough to impart basic knowledge so that the trainees will be able to recognize the signs of a problem pregnancy, and send the patient to a county hospital before the lives of mother and child are threatened.

By the time our trainees finish the program, they will know what is a normal pregnancy, be able to supervise a normal birth, and address common problems such as excessive bleeding. In babies and children, they will be able to treat ordinary diseases such as flu and diarrhea, and will be able to recognize signs of malnutrition.

The villages where these women come from are virtually without any knowledge of health care whatsoever. Therefore stress will be laid on fundamentals diet, hygiene, and innoculations. Even in large Chinese cities, young people do not receive sex education, therefore they have only the haziest notion of the reproductive process. This program will inject some badly needed knowledge.

The ten women chosen come from ten different villages in the backcountry of Yajiang. They range in age from 18 to 32, and all are junior middle school graduates with a sufficient understanding of Chinese so as to be able to understand the instructors and read medicine labels. At the conclusion of the course, each will receive a doctor's bag with basic medical equipment and a selection of the most commonly used medicines, which will be replenished as they are used.

The first three weeks of the program consist of classroom lectures. This will be followed by an apprenticeship at a Kangding hospital, so the women can see and assist in actual births. We are planning to make this an annual program, and this year's trainees will be invited back next year to freshen up their knowledge and mentor next year's bunch of students.

Sincerely,

Pamela Logan