EXCELLENCE IN PEOPLE


Excellence in: Obstetric Skills


Elizabeth Rafii-Tabar, RCOG Global Health Projects Manager, talks about a new THET-funded initiative to share skills with health workers in rural Uganda, to save the lives of mothers and babies and prevent obstetric fistula.


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n 2014, the RCOG made a successful application to THET (The Tropical Health and Education Trust) for a grant under its


Health Partnerships Scheme, funded by UK Aid, to run an Excellence in: Obstetric Skills course. The course will be run with RCOG partner organisation Kitovu Health Care Complex at the Kitovu site in Uganda. The course teaches emergency obstetric skills and fistula prevention measures to health workers in the region and will train local trainers to take the course forward, making it a long-term sustainable initiative. Kitovu is known across the world as


a centre for fistula surgery. Under the leadership of Dr Maura Lynch FRCOG


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(Hon), Director of Fistula, it runs several fistula surgery camps a year, supported by visits from international surgeons. The fistula camps offer women suffering from fistula the chance to live a life free from incontinence and the physical and psychological scars this condition creates. RCOG Fellows and Members have long been part of this effort to cure women of fistula and many hundreds of women from across Uganda and further afield have had successful surgery at Kitovu. The Excellence in: Obstetric Skills course will equip health workers (including nurses, midwives and doctors) with the skills, knowledge and confidence to take action to prevent women suffering from preventable


birth-related injuries such as fistula and, ultimately, to save more mothers and babies from dying during childbirth.


Training courses at Kitovu In September 2015, an RCOG faculty of two O&G consultants, a trainee, a project manager and two midwives, led by the Clinical Lead, Dr Helen Allott FRCOG from Royal Berkshire Hospital, travelled to Kitovu to deliver the first two training courses. A total of 50 health workers came to the two courses from a variety of settings, some from very small, ill-equipped health outposts and others from the large regional referral hospital in the nearby town of Masaka. They had been told


O&G November 2015


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