A Danish developed app for mobile phones teaches health workers in developing countries to help children into the world. The app makes the mobile phone into a kind of small handbook with practical information on how birth occurs, and what to do in various emergency situations – for example, if the mother is bleeding, or if the child is not breathing.
The whole thing is based as much as possible on graphics and small instruction animated movies, because the mobile app is supposed to be used especially by health workers in remote areas where education levels are low, and where it is difficult and expensive to reach with traditional training.
Doubles the competences
The Safe Delivery app has been scientifically tested in Ethiopia since 2013, in collaboration with researchers from the University of Copenhagen’s School of Global Health and the University of Southern Denmark, and the first results of the test is now available.
It turns out, the app strengthens the staff at the small health clinics significantly to make the right choices during and after birth. Health workers’ ability to handle a bleeding, and the ability to resuscitate a newborn, more than doubled after 12 months of use of the app. It writes the Danish NGO Maternity Foundation, which is behind the project and has ten years of experience with training health workers in developing countries.
It might seem contradictory that people in the world’s poorest areas can benefit from an app for smartphones. But Maternity Foundation sees great potential in using high-tech solutions in low developed countries:
Birth application
Nailonadege, aged 35, lies with her baby son, Francois Hollande on the maternity ward.
“There are more people in Africa who have a phone than there are people with access to water and sanitation – you talk about a revolution in mobile telephony,” says Anna Frellsen, director of the Maternity Foundation. She emphasizes the need for education is enormous:
“The global inequalities in maternal and child mortality is unacceptable. The tragedy is that we know that most of these lives can be saved with access to trained health workers. Therefore, it is important to exploit the technological possibilities to the limit with solutions such as The Safe Delivery App “.
Is now to be used in several countries
The finished version of the mobile program was officially launched on April 22, 2015 and it will now be made freely available to the health sector and NGOs in developing countries. Maternity Foundation will test and evaluate the app further, while deploying it across Africa. So far, an agreement with the Red Cross in Denmark and maternal health organization Marie Stopes International have been made, which will use the app in their health programs in Guinea and Tanzania.
The development of the app is funded by the initiative MSD for Mothers, The Obel Family Foundation, and through an international crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo (www.indiegogo.com) (caremaker is another international crowdfunding site), which in autumn 2014 brought over 50,000 dollars.
