Today sees more than 150 delegates from 15 different countries in Africa and Asia come together in Liverpool for a three day international conference hosted by LSTM’s Centre for Maternal and Newborn Health (CMNH).
The conference is taking place at the Radisson Blu hotel and boasts external speakers such as: Prof Matthews Mathai, Co-ordinator of the Epidemiology, Monitoring & Evaluation Team for WHO; Professor Gwyneth Lewis OBE, Director of International Maternal Health Research, University College London; Dr Gillian Mann, Department for International Development (DFID) and Sarah Brown, Executive Chair of Global Business Coalition for Education and the President of Theirworld. Each day will examine a different theme in relation to maternal and newborn health: the availability of care; the quality of care and measuring the effectiveness of care alongside future needs.
As well as taking part in talks and workshops the delegates will have to opportunity to examine 16 poster presentations of key research being undertaken by CMNH staff. All of the research presented in the posters will have real world applications in terms of post 2015 goals within global maternal and newborn health. They range from a new classification system for recording stillbirth in low and middle income settings to looking at ways to link more woman to health centre care through community health workers.
Many of CMNH’s in country partners for the Making it Happen programme, which sees UK trained midwives and obstetricians travel to 11 countries in Africa and Asia to deliver training to health professionals, arrived in Liverpool early last week and have been taking part in a number of workshops, based around learning best practice across a range of areas in their field. The in country programme teams will play a significant role in the coming three days, feeding back their results and looking at what their goals should be post the deadline for the Millennium Development Goals next year.
Professor Nynke van den Broek, head of CMNH, said: “We are very excited that the three days is underway and that so many of our international colleagues have been able to attend and participate. All our delegates, as well as our speakers, are passionate about improving the quality of maternal and newborn health internationally, and I think that with all of us working together we can develop practical and deliverable goals for mothers and their babies everywhere.”