Free bus rides driving ‘safe births’ in Nepal

Giving birth remains leading killer

RAMECHHAP, Nepal, July 17, (Agencies): As a teenager Meera Nepali was terrified as she went into labour with her first child at home in a remote village, miles from a hospital with nobody but her mother-in-law to help.

“I was a scared, but that was the norm. We didn’t have doctors close by,” Nepali told AFP of her threeday labour in Khadadevi village in Nepal’s hilly Ramechhap district.

This year however, she delivered her second child in a rural health centre thanks to a small cash incentive that is getting pregnant women to hospital by paying their bus fares.

The Aama Surakshya, or “protection for mothers”, programme has helped more than two million Nepali women access medical services in the impoverished country where dying in childbirth remains a very real risk.

The UN Population Fund says giving birth remains a leading killer of women of reproductive age in Nepal, where the risk of dying in childbirth is higher than anywhere else in South Asia except Afghanistan.

A huge obstacle to safe deliveries is the Himalayan nation’s tough terrain, which often makes getting to a health facility a long and expensive journey, as well as the paucity of clinics in many parts of the country.

“We found that one of the main reasons rural women did not go to a hospital during childbirth was because they did not have hard cash to pay for transportation,” said Suresh Tiwari, one of the original architects of the scheme.

Programme

The programme was started in 2005 with British aid money, but has since been taken over by the Nepal government.

Today, it covers not just transport but medical costs for mothers and babies and includes a cash bonus for attending antenatal checkups.

2017 marked a milestone for the programme: more Nepali women opted for hospital births over home deliveries for the first time on record, official figures show.

“The free service and transport incentive have been very effective in bringing women to health centres and hospitals where they can be saved in the case of complications,” said Tara Nath Pokharel, head of the government’s Family Health Division, which now runs the programme.

Nepali, one of the beneficiaries, paid nothing for her three-day stay at a clinic in Ramechhap district, east of Kathmandu, in January.

She was discharged with 1,000 rupees ($9) for transport plus a 400 rupee bonus for attending four antenatal appointments.

“I returned home in an ambulance. We hardly had to spend anything. I am really grateful for this facility,” Nepali said, cradling her young son in her arms.

The scheme is also saving lives outside the maternity wards, in part by tackling cultural obstacles.

Deeply patriarchal attitudes and traditional preferences for home births also see hospital visits dismissed as an unnecessary expense for poor families.

Sita Khatri went into labour weeks before her due date and, unable to walk the three hours to the nearest health centre, gave birth to a healthy boy at home.

But the 27-year-old suffered a retained placenta, a painful and potential fatal complication of childbirth, and had to plead with her husband to take her to hospital.

“He said we don’t have money. I insisted, saying there are government facilities, we won’t have to spend too much,” Khatri said.

“It is better to go the hospital than to die at home.”

A mass radio campaign in Burkina Faso led to a significant rise in sick children getting medical attention and could prove one of the most cost-effective ways to save young lives in poor countries, researchers said on Tuesday.

Publishing results of a trial involving a radio campaign in rural areas that promoted treatmentseeking for three of the biggest killers of children under five — malaria, pneumonia and diarrhoea — researchers said around 3,000 lives were saved.

“What this study shows is that using mass media to drive people to health centres is actually more cost-effective than almost anything on earth in terms of saving children’s lives,” said Roy Head, who co-led the study.

“And that makes sense — it reaches millions of people at a time — but this is the first time it has been shown in a scientific trial.”

The radio campaign, which the researchers said used a ‘saturation’ method of intensive radio transmissions over an extended period of time to promote behaviour change in a population, was run in Burkina Faso between 2012 and 2015.