GAIYA Volunteer's Story
Lydia and Yat are midwifery GAIYA volunteers placed at Kagoma Community Health Centre in Southern Kaduna who tell us a volunteer story. When they reported to the centre, their first experience was the problem of acute shortage of staff in every department of the hospital. Besides many of the medical facilities in the labs; labours wards, general wards and maternity wards were in a state of poor maintenance and disrepair, though some of them could function. The children’s ward was not regularly swept because casual staff’s names were struck off the employees list in last year’s Government restructuring exercise, so patients were helping themselves to clean the wards. Lydia and Yet took it upon themselves to volunteer in sweeping the children ward to maintain cleanliness in other to avoid spread of hospital disease to the children.According to Lydia, the labour wards were equally in the same state, but being a midwife, she immediately requested the health centre to permit her participate in the management of the wards and deliveries of expectant mothers. She had earlier on observed that mothers and their delivery processes were porly managed leading to refusal of women to attend antenatal and maternity services.
Within her first week in the labour ward, Lydia assisted in 20 successful deliveries in the labour. Within a few weeks, the health centre was flooded with expectant mothers registering for antenatal services. Her challenge however was to divide up time for antenatal sessions and carrying out labour deliveries. To manage this, Lydia drew a schedule for delivering antenatal sessions with the help of Yat that is every Thursday of the week at 9.00am. This gave her time to attend to the untimely expected labour and deliveries for mothers
Lydia’s volunteer stint is full of surprises, on weekends she moves to interact with local communities and has successfully conducted 11 home deliveries for mothers stuck there in the remote parts of the villages. She usually gets information from GAIYA health community workers who traverse the villages for community health sensitisation. Lydia is so surprised that after helping mothers in their houses with safe deliveries, they expect her to ask for payment for the job done. Lydia, the GAIYA volunteer, always tells them that what she is doing is voluntary work only and that she gets personal satisfaction as her pay, when she uses her skills to help mothers in that situation.
Yat on her part spoke to me that when she started her work, she was helping Lydia more often in the labour ward and delivering antenatal sessions. Yat is double trained i.e. a counselor/midwife. As mothers now gain confidence in their services, more of them register for antenatal services. This gave Yat the opportunity to revise the Prevention of Mother to Child transmission of HIV/AIDS (PMTC) program. By the time we went for the placement visit in February 2007, the health centre in charge was full of praises for Yat for this initiative. About 100 mothers had been counseled and 10 of them found HIV positive had willingly registered for the program and were put on ART regime.
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