Birthing kits save lives of thousands of mothers

More than 800 women die each day due to complications from childbirth. One Australian foundation has been working to help reduce that statistic with a very simple idea.

In a church hall in the Adelaide Hills, dozens of volunteers have given up their afternoon to help thousands of women they’ll never meet.

“We start with the gloves, these are for the traditional birthing attendant,” says volunteer Kylie Porter-Wright.

“The soap goes in [the gloves], for them to wash their hands. Gauze, to wipe the baby’s eyes. Three pieces of string, this is for the umbilical cord.

“And the razor, to cut the umbilical cord.”

The volunteers are putting together birthing kits, containing the bare essentials to help reduce the risk of infection for women giving birth in some of the world’s harshest environments.

The World Health Organisation estimates 830 women die each day from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth.

Around 99 per cent of maternal deaths occur in developing countries.

Rebekah Bowmen, chair of the Australian College of Midwives in the ACT, says conditions can sometimes be very unhygienic.  

“The conditions women would be giving birth in vary from just, not even knowing that they should be washing their hands and using gloves as a birth attendant, to really quite dirty areas as well, whether that’s their floor or even sometimes makeshift hospitals that aren’t cleaning their equipment," Ms Bowman says.

She says providing sterile equipment and training to birthing attendants helps prevent potentially deadly infections.

“When that’s been audited, it looks like those kits have been reducing infections by around 25 per cent, and that’s saving a lot of lives,” Ms Bowman says.

Many of the volunteers at the Adelaide Hills birthing kit assembly day are members of the Zonta Club, a professional network for women.

Dr Joy O’Hazy brought the concept to the organisation after hearing about similar kits from a speech given by actor Sally Field, in 1995 while she was working with the international not-for-profit, Save the Children.

“She was talking about the fact that she’d been in Nepal the previous week, and that they were using very basic kits that women were using to birth," Dr O'Hazy said.

Ms Field had been working with the international not-for-profit, Save the Children, at the time.

Dr O'Hazy had been searching for a way to improve health outcomes for women.  

“I thought, 'This is something I can do myself. And if I can do it, then it’s easier than maybe trying to solve breast cancer, or have a laboratory'," she says.

The wallet-sized kits are lightweight and cheap, costing just $3 to put together.

Since the first one was put together in Australia in 1999, 1.4 million have been distributed across the globe including Ethiopia, Myanmar and Afghanistan. 

The kits being assembled when SBS News visited will go to Nigeria, a country with one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world.