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EngenderHealth Addresses Obstetric Fistula

Obstetric fistula, a debilitating complication of childbirth, persists in many developing countries. The Fistula Care Project is helping to strengthen fistula management and prevention services worldwide. For more information about the Fistula Care Project, please visit www.fistulacare.org .

Sifa’s Story

Program Background
The Fistula Care Project is a five-year cooperative agreement funded by USAID and managed by EngenderHealth . The Project works to address the enormous backlog of women awaiting life-altering fistula repair, ensuring that they receive timely and quality care from trained providers. At the same time, it works to remove barriers to emergency obstetric care that lead to fistula in the first place, so that women in labor get to the right place with the right services at the right time.
The project is supporting a network of facilities offering a continuum of services, from emergency obstetric care, referrals, and family planning to complex fistula repairs and advanced surgical training. In addition, the Fistula Care Project gathers data from other USAID-supported projects that work on fistula.

Fistula Care is focusing on:

• Training surgical teams and strengthening the capacity of hospitals to provide optimal care for women with fistula
• Preventing new cases of fistula by improving the quality of emergency obstetric care and increasing access to family planning
• Engaging communities to change social norms and enable women to have timely access to maternal health care
• Collecting and analyzing data in order to improve the quality of current fistula services
• Introducing new tools, including a training strategy , supervision and monitoring tools for training and for service delivery , a knowledge assessment tool for trainees, data collection forms, and an online database for Fistula Care colleagues around the world
• Encouraging a supportive policy environment for fistula repair services and prevention
  

EngenderHealth began its work on fistula in 2001, conducting research in collaboration with the Women’s Dignity Project  in Tanzania and Uganda. In 2003, with support from the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), it conducted the first-ever international assessments of the availability of, and need for, fistula services in nine countries. EngenderHealth subsequently became the managing partner of a five-year project supported by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to raise awareness of fistula and increase access to services, in collaboration with the Women’s Dignity Project and UNFPA.

In 2004, USAID began to provide support for fistula services through projects managed by EngenderHealth. The initial scope of work was primarily focused on training surgeons in fistula surgery and on strengthening the capacity of sites to provide quality fistula surgery. In September 2007, USAID awarded a five-year Associate Cooperative Agreement to create the Fistula Care project. With this award, the scope of work has been expanded to include a focus on prevention activities. The program has grown from five sites in two countries in 2004 to more than 27 treatment sites in 11 countries in 2009.

Supported Sites

 

USAID funding currently supports 27 treatment sites in 11 countries to provide fistula surgery and care. EngenderHealth, with USAID support, has assisted these sites to treat more than 11,783 women between 2005 and June 2009.
 
To read more about the Fistula Care Projects's supported sites and in-country program results, please click here.

This page last updated September 11, 2009 12:22 .