Pre-service education refers to the education that a health care professional receives in midwifery or medical teaching institutions before entering into providing health services.
The Safe Delivery App can be used to improve pre-service teaching methodologies around BEmONC (Basic Emergency Obstetric and Neonatal Care) making instruction more efficient, effective and demonstrative. It improves learnings by students by providing strong visual demonstration, interactive and engaging features. Providing students the App during pre-service also helps ensure that skills and knowledge will follow them into practice, as they can bring the App with them after they graduate.
In-service education or continuous professional development (CPD) refers to continuing education to maintain knowledge and skills. Most professions, including midwifery or nurse midwifery have CPD obligations.
The Safe Delivery App can be leveraged in continuous professional development courses, including various BEmONC courses using blended learning methodology. Blended learning, the combination of in-person and multi-media training, is an attractive learning methodology in low income settings. It can address many of the barriers of traditional training formats in particular access to remote areas. It is considered more effective, appropriate, cost-effective, and scalable. The App can be used as a remote refreshment training tool, and with built-in knowledge and confidence level testing features that can help monitor knowledge retention and identify knowledge gaps in need of further training.
Finally, the App can boost instructors teaching of in-service BEmONC in similar ways to pre-service by making trainings more time efficient, enabling different teaching methods which are more engaging and interactive, and facilitating demonstration. Institutions that provide CPD certification/accreditation can work with Maternity Foundation to use the Safe Delivery App’s learning platform certification to count towards CPD credits.
Many skilled birth attendants have little in the way of up-to-date, guideline-adherent, easy to understand, practical job aids to help them deal with obstetric and newborn emergencies at their health center or hospital.
The Safe Delivery App provides direct and instant access to evidence-based and up-to-date clinical guidelines through animated videos, practical procedures, action cards and essential drug and equipment lists that will help health workers to correctly prevent, diagnose and manage life threatening complications on-the-job.
In addition to the three above-mentioned user scenarios, Maternity Foundation is exploring with partners how to implement the Safe Delivery App in humanitarian settings, e.g. in countries and/or areas affected by violence, conflict and emergency situations. UNFPA estimates that 61% of maternal deaths take place in countries affected by humanitarian crisis or fragile conditions.
