bringing communities together to prevent maternal and newborn death

SCOPE programs bring together medical professionals and faith leaders to improve access and uptake of life-saving maternal and newborn healthcare services. In 2018, 39 out of every 1000 infants died before their first birthday. While births with skilled providers in health facilities are on the rise, more than half of women still delivered their babies at home in 2019 without a healthcare provider with training and resources to deal with complications during childbirth.  Reducing maternal and neonatal deaths has been at the top of the World Health Organization’s global health agenda for over a decade. Use of MNCH (Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health) services, however, still remains low in Ethiopia’s rural communities. Complex challenges including transportation, health literacy, imbalanced decision-making authority, and traditional medical practices create barriers to increasing coverage.   Our programs focus on improving access to antenatal care, facility delivery, and care for newborns.

faith leaders advocating for maternal empowerment (FLAME)

SCOPE is proud to announce the completion of testing of an intervention designed to increase the number of women who get medical care during pregnancy and delivery in Ethiopia. Results from SCOPE’s first clinical trial were published in the Journal of Global Health in a manuscript entitled “Partnering Faith Leaders with community health workers increases utilization of antenatal care and facility delivery services in Ethiopia: A cluster randomized trial.” In the trial, SCOPE trained community health workers and faith leaders to promote health messages around safe delivery in the community and encourage parishioners to seek care. Results from the study showed that health centers that received the intervention recorded 14% more 1st prenatal visits and 26% more 4th prenatal visits compared to control health centers. Intervention health centers also experienced a 10% increase in facility deliveries when compared to the control group. We hope these results will lead other organizations to leverage the SCOPE model to harness the influential role of faith leaders in communities for public health benefits.

We are extremely grateful for the support of our partners and their contributions to this study.  Partners include the University of Washington, the University of Gondar, the North Gondar Diocese, and the University Presbyterian Church. Our work would not be possible without them!  

Leading Advancements in the Uptake of Newborn & Community Health (LAUNCH)

Building on the success of the FLAME project, SCOPE is working on a two-year intervention, funded by the Stewardship and the Frankel Family Foundations called Leading Advancements in the Uptake of Newborn Community Health (LAUNCH). The project focuses on leveraging faith communities to improve newborn health by integrating culturally relevant education and training into existing community activities like church services, home visits by priests, and mother support groups. Through LAUNCH activities, SCOPE is testing a scalable intervention for community-based newborn and infant health in Gondar informed by past and ongoing SCOPE research. SCOPE and our partner universities will collect data about the impact of these activities on newborn nutrition, growth, and receipt of recommended vaccines on schedule.  LAUNCH involves SCOPE’s current partners as well as new and expanding partners in the Ministry of Health, the Gondar Regional Health Bureau, and others to ensure that this intervention can be used within existing health and community structures.

LAUNCH - Implementation Science Segment

The driving goal of SCOPE is to deliver, test, and spread effective interventions that improve health. Unfortunately, even programs that are effective in one setting can fail to deliver impact if they have poor implementation at scale. The LAUNCH clinical trial works to validate a model where faith leaders partner with community health workers to improve newborn health.  Concurrent with the LAUNCH trial, we are using rigorous methods known as implementation science, to help prepare the SCOPE model for a rapid and successful transition from a small clinical trial to widespread implementation if the trial shows positive results on measurable health outcomes. 

Working with principal investigators, Dr. Arianna Means (UW) and Dr. Getahun Asres (UG), Dieudonne Hakizimana, a Ph.D. student in the UW Implementation Science program and SCOPE pre-doctoral fellow Kegnie Shitu from the University of Gondar are working together to assess the potential of Ethiopia's health system to scale up the LAUNCH intervention. They are working with key stakeholders in the community, the Ministry of Health, and other agencies to assess six readiness domains—policies, leadership structure, financial resources, material resources, technical capacity, and community delivery infrastructure. Information gained from LAUNCH-IS will help drive the next steps in planning for broader implementation.