Partnering to Improve Maternal Health and Access to Obstetric Fistula Treatment

Direct Relief International and Edna Adan University Hospital are working together to improve health services for mothers and children in Somaliland. Since 1948, Direct Relief’s core activities have been aimed at expanding the quality, availability, and access to health services for all people with a principal focus on supporting interventions that reduce threats to women during pregnancy and childbirth. Edna Adan University Hospital opened in 2002 to provide quality medical services for the women and children of Somaliland and has expanded rapidly to become a primary referral hospital and key teaching facility in the Horn of Africa. Working together, Direct Relief and Edna Adan University Hospital, believe they can do more to ensure that all women and children receive good quality health services.

Direct Relief and Edna Adan University Hospital – then the Edna Adan Maternity and Teaching Hospital—entered into partnership in 2005. Direct Relief has provided donations of medical supplies to improve the Hospital’s maternal health capacity, and in November of 2005 supplied items to help upgrade the operating theater and delivery room including an examination table, operating room light, sterilizer, instruments, general and surgical hospital supplies, pharmaceuticals, and nutritional products. Over the years, Direct Relief had provided substantial and valuable supplies and equipment.

In 2009, Direct Relief, in collaboration with The Fistula Foundation, increased support to Edna Adan University Hospital to improve the hospital’s ability to provide treatment and care for women with obstetric fistula, one of the most tragic injuries of obstructed childbirth. This support includes the construction and equipping of an operating theater and the development of a training curriculum for midwives and nurses in obstetric fistula management. The grant funding makes possible the construction of not only one operating theater, but three, so that the Hospital can increase its capacity to treat patients and grow in its essential role as a leading teaching and referral hospital in the Horn of Africa.

Many women have received treatment for obstetric fistula at Edna’s Hospital, and with continued support from Direct Relief and The Fistula Foundation the number of women receiving life-restoring treatment will increase. When asked about the importance of providing fistula repair Edna remarked: “I am grateful as a woman and human being to be able to help women like them; people think I have given something but they don’t know how much I am getting. There is no bank in the world big enough to hold what I get from the satisfaction of seeing a woman who was leaking urine for 30 years leave the hospital and go home dry.”