Learning Together: Improving Women’s Health

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The health of women has a direct effect on the health of the future generation, their families, and communities. In other words, healthy women means health family, healthy society and healthy nations. Women’s health is affected by many factors such as culture, society and religion but pregnancy and childbirth have a huge impact on their health. According to World Health Organization about 830 women died everyday due to complications of pregnancy and child birth in 2015. The primary causes of maternal death are haemorrhage, hypertension, infections, and indirect causes, and indirect causes, mostly due to interaction between pre-existing medical conditions and pregnancy. Almost all of these deaths occurred in developing countries because of limited resources and shortage of qualified health care professionals, and most could have been prevented. In order to prevent maternal deaths, health care professionals including doctors, nurses, midwives have a pivotal role and responsibilities as well as policy makers. It is expected that every health care professionals must be well prepared and competent to give quality and safe health care services. Educational institutions has unique role to prepare these health care professionals for real life practices.

It is known that educational institutions use variety teaching strategies and methods to develop student’s cognitive, affective and psychomotor skills. Interprofessional education has become an effective teaching strategy since it brings health professional students together to give holistic health care services. WHO also recognizes interprofessional collaboration in education and practice as an innovative strategy to promote patient safety, maximize limited health resources, move care from acute to primary care settings or encourage greater integrated working. It also increases health worker job satisfaction or provides greater role clarity for health workers when working in teams.

Simulation is seen as an effective educational strategy that may provide an effective way to teach interprofessional collaboration for students and health care professionals. Simulation helps to increase patient safety, decrease the incidence of error and improve clinical judgment when working as a team. Simulated learning activities provides learners an opportunity to build their confidence, apply their knowledge, enhance technical, critical thinking and crisis management skills in “no-risk” environment. This also affords educators the opportunity to verify the competence of health professionals in a safe, interactive environment, before they enter the clinical setting. Therefore, health educators should be encouraged to use interprofessional education to develop students’ competencies to give effective women health services. Hence, policy makers and managers should support them to implement this innovative strategy in health care curricula and settings.

We hope that Mathews Journal of Gynecology & Obstetrics will contribute to women’s health around the world with high-quality publications of the authors. We are looking forward to receiving your valuable experiences to share with our extended reader population.