Guyanese women to have greater access to emergency contraceptives

Maternal Health Services Director, Dr Janice Woolford

Maternal and Child Health Services Director, Dr Janice Woolford has announced that the Georgetown Public Hospital Corporation (GPHC) has decided to make emergency contraceptives available for public distribution.
Dr Woolford stated that the Maternal Health Department has recently been trying to promote emergency contraception as one of the main methods of family planning.
She revealed that the GPHC has begun to distribute emergency contraceptives at the Accident and Emergency Unit, especially in cases of rape.
According to Dr Woolford, the contraceptive prevalence rate has increased from 34.5 per cent to 43 per cent in 2011. She noted that the Maternal Health Department has also been inserting intrauterine devices (IUDs) post delivery, as a contraceptive measure, especially for women from outlying and hinterland areas.
“Monitoring women from these areas has been proving very problematic in recent years. We have had serious problems with referrals for hinterland areas, and so we have taken this step,” Dr Woolford pointed out.
She mentioned that there have been strong linkages between reproductive health and HIV prevention, treatment and care. As such, maternity patients have been undergoing screening for HIV and HIV-related infections during and after pregnancy.

Need for public education
A review of the contributions to maternal health through United  Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) support revealed an absence of a national sustained public education programme to create awareness and a demand for contraception.
The programmes’ technical capacity, including counselling by healthcare workers, needs to be strengthened and must be supported with appropriate tools and supervision, the review found.
It added that there is need for further integration of family planning in existing health-care and other community-based activities as well as logistics management/distribution system.
In order to strengthen and maintain family planning, it was discovered that it must be reinforced as a national development issue to reduce maternal mortality and improve quality of life.
The government may count on the full support of the UNFPA to ensure a high-quality family life programme.
It was found that family planning promotion and delivery programmes must be strengthened in regions with high inequality and unmet need.
There is also need to expand the family planning methods mix to include long-term methods such as implants and emergency contraception.

Suggestion

The Maternity Ward at the GPHC

In addition, it was suggested that the high rate of abortion be addressed by strengthening access to family planning information and services, in particular, post-partum and post-abortion counselling by developing a sustained public education programme to increase awareness and demand.
The review also listed the strengthening of youth development initiatives (in and out of school) to reduce adolescent pregnancy, Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) and HIV through access to information and services on sexual reproductive health and sexuality education.
According to the report, the elimination of maternal mortality as a public health problem is now in sight in Guyana, given the progress of the past few years and the implementation of several recommendations and the current health budget.
Reduction of maternal mortality should be a process of continuous quality improvement, the review found, and as such, maternal death surveillance and response plays a critical role.
While Guyana has strong maternal death surveillance, it still needs to work to strengthen the maternal death review process so as to better understand the cause of each maternal death, and most importantly, to put in place corrective measures to avert subsequent maternal deaths.
This would enable Guyana to rapidly move towards elimination of maternal mortality as a public health problem.