Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologia (CIESAS)

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The following is part of a series of project updates from the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologia (CIESAS). MHTF is supporting their project, Evaluation of ALSO Program. More information on MHTF supported projects can be found here.

Written by: CIESAS

In Mexico, CIESAS is conducting an assessment of the Ministry of Health’s Advanced Life Support for Obstetrics Program (ALSO) that manages delivery emergencies in the state of Oaxaca. Together with the Mexico office of the Population Council, CIESAS will determine whether ALSO courses improve technical skills and working morale of health care providers enough to justify expansion of the program nationwide.

CIESAS carried out the first expert and team-work meeting on May 28th in the Population Council office in Mexico City with the assistance of all team members, an additional expert from Population Council, the general director of ALSO in Mexico and two representatives from the Ministry of Health (MOH) in Oaxaca. We reviewed the entire evaluation design and made important decisions in reference to hospitals’ evaluation sites, methodological instruments to be designed, activities’ time schedule, observers’ profile and selection process, registration of the project with the Oaxaca MOH, and task assignments among participants.

In June and July, the CIESAS team did an extensive search for existing EmOC competency-based checklists to guide the design of our own hospital observation checklist, finding some useful instruments from WHO-IMPAC, Pathfinders, PATH, and AMDD. We reviewed these instruments, at the same time that we reviewed the ALSO manual used in Mexico and the Mexican technical norms and guidelines for EmOC of the federal Ministry of Health.

In May and July, we carried out the actual monitoring of the Valdivieso and Pochutla hospitals in reference to infrastructure, available human resources, personnel’s workshifts, available medical equipments, instruments and drugs. In July we began the search for suitable observers to hire for the hospital-based observations of EmOC management.