Sexual and Reproductive Health with Isaac Eranga

Birth attendants on the frontline of childbirth delivery in India’s public hospitals work under challenging circumstances. One on one coaching is the core of a childbirth safety improvement trial involving these health care workers in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Source: PSI/Ariadne Labs   Font Size   Print January 12, 2015 Making Childbirth Safer: It Takes a Sales Force Atul Gawande , Vishwajeet Kumar , Ruth Landy , Mariam Claeson January 12, 2015 “The mother and her newborn are safe in my hands!” Ishrawati, a birth attendant at a remote health center in northern India, is feeling confident, and in many ways that’s surprising. Like millions of mostly female health workers delivering babies in the world’s poorest communities, Ishrawati works under conditions of chronic scarcity. No heating in her facility during freezing winters; no air conditioning in

The renewed Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health 2015 is to be a roadmap for ending all preventable deaths of women, children, and adolescents by 2030 and improving their overall health and well-being. The renewed Strategy will support the achievement of women’s, children’s and adolescents’ health- related post-2015 ”Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs), moving beyond reductions in mortality to a vision of healthy life for all through the life-course. The renewed strategy is being developed by a wide range of national, regional and global stakeholders with strong leadership and technical support from WHO under the umbrella of EWEC and the UN Secretary-General. WHO Assistant Director-General, Dr Flavia Bustreo sits on the overarching Strategy and Coordination Group and leads the writing team that will collect and synthesize inputs from a wide range of stakeholders to develop the first and subsequent drafts of the strategy. Technical

LONDON —Today, Family Planning 2020 (FP2020) released its second progress report detailing achievements since the landmark 2012 London Summit on Family Planning. The report, Partnership in Progress, shows the initiative is making steady progress toward its goal of enabling an additional 120 million women and girls in the world’s 69 poorest countries with access to voluntary family planning information, services and supplies by 2020. The report includes the first set of quantitative results on several core indicators designed to track progress toward the FP2020 goal. Notably, in 2013 the number of women and girls using modern contraceptives in FP2020’s 69 focus countries increased by 8.4 million. Expanded access to family planning helped avert 77 million unintended pregnancies, compared to 75 million in 2012; 125,000 maternal deaths, compared to 120,000 in 2012; and 24 million unsafe abortions, compared to 23 million in 2012. “Deciding about pregnancy should be by choice, not