Call for Posts: How to Increase Access to Maternal and Reproductive Health Supplies

By: Beth Yeager, Principal Technical Advisor, Management Sciences for Health & Chair, Maternal Health Supplies Caucus, Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition; Katie Millar, Technical Writer, Women and Health Initiative, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Milka Dinev, LAC Forum Regional Advisor, Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition

The Maternal Health Task Force (MHTF), the Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition (RHSC)/Maternal Health Supplies Caucus (MHS), Family Care International (FCI) and the USAID-Accelovate program at Jhpiego share the goal of increasing awareness of the key role that reliable access to quality maternal and reproductive health supplies plays in reducing maternal mortality. To this end, we’d like to invite you to contribute a post to our blog series, Increasing access to maternal and reproductive health supplies: Leveraging lessons learned in preventing maternal mortality.

Our goal for this blog series is to create a platform for sharing innovative interventions, lessons-learned and opportunities for collaboration across various organizations and communities in terms of what can be done to ensure availability of quality maternal health supplies. The proposed new global target of fewer than 70 maternal deaths per 100,000 births by 2030 makes timely access to quality maternal and reproductive health medicines and supplies for women even more critical.

Two of the major causes of maternal deaths are post-partum hemorrhage (PPH) and pre-eclampsia/eclampsia. Both conditions can be successfully managed with proven interventions that include administration of oxytocin and misoprostol in the case of PPH, and magnesium sulfate for pre-eclampsia and eclampsia.

Unfortunately, many health systems face challenges that limit access to these life-saving commodities. For example, in some cases there is insufficient funding for these medicines in national budgets, driving increased out-of-pocket spending. Likewise, regulatory agencies are sometimes unable to assure the quality of products circulating in the market due to funding and human resource constraints. Storage conditions remain inadequate for medicines with special storage requirements, like maintaining the cold chain. Lack of information systems that provide up-to-date, reliable data on supply availability further complicates the issue as managers are unable to make evidence-based decisions regarding supplies. Finally, demand side barriers exist as providers often lack appropriate guidance on the use of these life-saving supplies.

These challenges are not insurmountable. Indeed, many of these challenges have been successfully addressed in ensuring access to reproductive health commodities. The reproductive health community has worked for more than three decades to improve the quality of their supplies, strengthen the supply chains that deliver these supplies (mainly contraceptives) and create information systems that help managers make decisions regarding these supplies. Many of these lessons could well apply to increase accessibility and availability of quality maternal health supplies.

Questions and topics for potential guest posts:

What are the barriers you face in ensuring mothers get the supplies they need? How has your work addressed the complicated interplay between contributing factors that attribute to a mother not receiving the life-saving medicine she needs?
Are governments assuming responsibility for and taking the necessary actions to address maternal health supplies issues? What strategies have been successful to increase involvement of government in ensuring maternal health supplies?
What have been successful strategies to reduce financial barriers to access maternal health supplies?
What are lessons learned regarding supply chains for maternal health and information systems for their monitoring?
How can we best prepare health providers to both use maternal health supplies correctly and advocate for their use?
What strategies can be used to raise awareness of the importance of quality assurance among governments, health providers and women?
How can we use the lessons learned by the reproductive health community to advance the maternal health supplies issues?

If your work involves other factors related to supplies, please feel free to propose an original topic.

General guidelines for guest blog posts:

Please include the author name, title, and photo
Goal: Guest posts should raise questions, discuss lessons learned, analyze programs, describe research, offer recommendations, share resources, or offer critical insight
Audience: The audience for this series is health and development professionals working in maternal and newborn health around the world, primarily in resource-constrained settings
Tone: Conversational. Does not need to meet professional publication standards
Feel free to choose your own style or approach. Q/A and lists (e.g. top ten lessons) can often be effective ways of organizing a blog post
Length: 400-600 words
No institutional promotion
Please include links to sources such as websites and/or publications
May also include photos and videos, please include a caption and a credit for the photo

To contribute a post to this series, please contact, Katie Millar, at kmillar@hsph.harvard.edu.

Submissions to this series will be reviewed and accepted on a rolling basis, but preference will be given to posts received by March 30th, 2014.

Posts in this series will be shared on the MHTF blog and may be cross-posted on other leading global health and development blogs.

Thank you for considering contributing to our series. We look forward to hearing from you soon!