Safe Motherhood in Nepal

News and Events

Pre-Service Skilled Birth Attendance Training

To complement the current programme of in-service Skilled Birth Attendance (SBA) training for doctors, nurses and auxiliary nurse midwives (ANM), a new national strategy for pre-service education in SBA skills has been drafted, in collaboration with the Institute of Medicine. The aim of this to ensure that by 2012/3 all newly graduating doctors and nurses will qualify as SBAs, and will therefore not require in service training. For the immediate future, ANMs will continue to receive in-service SBA training, but gradually their pre-service courses will also be revised. Following discussion with safe motherhood stakeholders, this draft document is now in process for government endorsement. Meanwhile the curricula for certificate and bachelor level nurses and for medical doctors have been revised to include SBA core skills, replacing the existing curricula at IoM affiliated training institutions. Ultimately all training institutions will be expected to adopt the new courses. The standard SBA Learning Resource Package, which forms the base of both in-service and pre-service training, has been revised to make it more user friendly and a new combined reference manual compiled, incorporating all the required reference materials in one easy pack. This is another important step in the national effort to increase the availability and quality of care during pregnancy, delivery and the postpartum period.