In Meghalaya, mothers for years have had to deal with challenges including limited access to healthcare, modern medicines and necessary infrastructure.
To ascertain how the state government’s MOTHER scheme is changing this, Shombi Sharp, UN Resident Coordinator for India visited Mawtawar health and wellness centre on Friday along with Principal Secretary in the Health Department, Sampath Kumar, and East Khasi Hills Deputy Commissioner RM Kurbah, among others.
MOTHER and other initiatives aim to empower women by ensuring their health rights. Meghalaya is the first state in the country to conceptualise the Early Childhood Development (ECD) Mission. This is to ensure that Meghalaya effectively tackles the problem of malnutrition among children.
The government, in its mission to decrease the maternal and infant mortality rates (MMR and IMR) commenced the MOTHER project to provide proactive healthcare services to the beneficiaries.
The MOTHER programme is an app-based digital platform to outreach any nearby health centres connecting the healthcare workers with the mothers during labour pains and the last stage of pregnancy. In the past, 20 percent of mortality happened during transit.
“It is heartening to note that this platform is now being extended as SAVE MOTHERS to the would-be mothers themselves and here in this centre for the last one year there have been no cases of human mortality for high-risk mothers due to this effective online and seamless communication between mothers and healthcare providers,” Sharp was quoted as saying.
In addition, under the Chief Minister’s Safe Motherhood Scheme (CM-SMS) transit homes and vehicles for the transport of high-risk pregnant and expectant mothers are being made available. There are over 2.2 lakh beneficiaries till date with 80-plus transit homes and 150 vehicles for free transport stationed at health centres around the clock to enhance the rate of institutional deliveries, a press release stated today.
