 An alternative to unattended delivery--A training programme for village midwives in Papua New GuineaWilliam A. Alto, Ruth E. Albu and Garabinu Irabo Social Science & Medicine, 1991, vol. 32, issue 5, 613-618 Abstract: Certain linguistic groups in the Southern Highlands of Papua New Guinea are unique in that there is no cultural role for a traditional birth attendant and, therefore, women deliver alone unattended. A programme to train village women as midwives was begun at Nipa Health Centre in 1981 and later expanded to a province-wide scope in 1986. Thirty-two Angal Heneng village midwives were trained during the period 1981-1989. Women of this language group have traditionally given birth alone. By 1989 the Angal Heneng village midwives had supervised 623 deliveries while 24 of them were still practicing. Well accepted in the community, they attended 11% of all births in 1989. Their efforts contributed to infant and perinatal mortality rates that were lower among the Angal Heneng than those of the neighbouring language group. Keywords: village; midwife; training; traditional; birth; attendant; Papua; New; Guinea (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:32:y:1991:i:5:p:613-618 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier |
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