Hospital Rwanda

The Head of Midwifery Education and Women?s Health at Edge Hill is flying out to Rwanda to provide support to a maternity hospital which was set up using funds raised by her parish church, St Luke?s in Formby.

Returning to the hospital that she first visited in 2001 and again in 2005, Jane Morgan will be working for two weeks offering clinical skills? training for safe delivery and care of the newborn.

The maternity hospital has no midwives and is currently staffed by nurses. Edge Hill?s Faculty of Health has been fundraising to tackle this problem, with over £4,000 raised to date. Jane has used £1,000 to set up a scholarship for one of the nurses to train as a midwife in Rwanda. It is a year long programme, with the midwife starting her studies in January 2006, and returning to the hospital as a qualified midwife.

The rest of the funds, have been used to set up a Safe Motherhood project. Dr Caleb King, an American who is also involved in the project, is using the money to subsidise safe delivery.

In Rwanda, it costs £30 for a caesarean section and £3 for a normal delivery. Women often stay at home without a skilled helper, as they cannot afford the hospital fees. The money raised will subsidise the cost of delivery by reducing it to £15 and £1.50. This means that women can deliver in a safe, clean environment with some trained help.

Jane said, "The risk of death from childbirth in Rwanda is one in ten, compared to one in 3800 in the UK, so I?m looking forward to going back to compare the developments at the hospital to the last time I visited in 2005. Despite there now being a new maternity hospital, there aren?t any trained midwives to work there, so hopefully the funding and expertise we have provided is starting to reap rewards by saving lives and generally improving the health of mothers and their children."

Rwanda is still recovering from the genocide that swept through the country in 1994, when an estimated one million people were killed as part of an ethnic cleansing programme. Seven million Rwandans were displaced and three million fled the country, with many professional people murdered or escaping the conflict.