Family planning plays a central role in improving maternal health, preventing 137 million unintended pregnancies each year results in 40 million safe and unsafe annual abortions and 25 million spontaneous miscarriages. If women are at every opportunity informed and counseled to use family planning evidence from many countries has shown that this can result in a 40% reduction in pregnancy related maternal deaths and about 78 million of the 147 million child deaths that occur every year.
Mindful of the alarming unmet needs for Family Planning in the region, ECSACON being the professional body for nurses and midwives in the ECSA region has worked with Evidence to Action project to strengthen family planning component in pre-service nursing and midwifery education. The college has embarked in supporting development of such tools for strengthening competence based family planning in view of sharpening the skills and attitude of graduates who play a key role in increasing access to quality family planning services.
Building on the previous technical assistance provided by ECSA Health Community through its professional body for nurses ECSACON together with USAID funded flagship project E2A made more strides in supporting Uganda to contextualize the Family Planning TrainingResource package and other documents aiming at strengthening the capacity of nurse teachers in imparting the knowledge on Family Planning to students. The package was introduced in December 2015 to the representatives from the Ministry of Health, Uganda Nurses and Midwives Council Ministry of Education, Science, Technology, and Sports, Uganda Nurses and Midwives Examination Board, ECSACON Uganda Chapter selected universities and schools of nursing including private and public schools of nursing and midwifery.
The workshop was held at Hotel Africana from 27th June to 8th July 2016 involving the same key stakeholders. The workshop was cordially opened by Prof. Anthony Mbonye who is the acting Director General ministry of health Uganda.
The workshop was the follow on activity to customize the global and regional Family Planning packages to be used in Uganda. In the course of two weeks the team managed to develop the Family Planning trainers guide including lesson plans, PowerPoint presentations, checklists, case studies and respective handouts for different family planning methods.
The team is expected to finalize the drafts, validate them and disseminate to all schools of nursing and midwifery in Uganda.