Press Release - AFMED

BUTTE MEDICAL TEAM TO ADVANCE AFRICAN FAMILY HEALTH CARE IN NIGERIA

Butte, MT – Two Butte organizations, Maternal Life International (MLI) and the National Center for Health Care Informatics (NCHCI) at Montana Tech, have joined to advance family medicine in Nigeria, promoting safe births and combating malaria, tuberculosis, and mother-to-child transmission of AIDS. Nigeria with 135 million people has one of the highest maternal death rates in the world, as well as increasing levels of infectious diseases.

Dr. George Mulcaire-Jones, Butte physician and MLI’s medical director, and Ray Rogers, NCHCI’s chief executive, leave Sunday, February 24, for two weeks of specialty medical training and information technology evaluation and development. They will be joined by Dr. Robert Scanlon of Huntington, New York, an obstetrician and gynecologist, who heads MLI’s New York affiliate, Aiding Infants and Mothers (AIM) that funds women and infant health care in Nigeria.

“Since 2003, we’ve taught essential safe-birthing techniques to more than 800 Nigerian health care workers,” Dr. Mulcaire-Jones said. “This latest phase, known as The African Family Medicine Education and Development Initiative, or AFMED, will focus on specialty medical training for smaller groups of family physicians, which is necessary to sustain improvements in community care.”

This year’s program will take place at Our Lady of the Apostles Hospital (OLA) in Jos, Nigeria. It will be augmented by additional course work through interactive web-based distance learning and other technological information tools to be developed by the NCHCI.

“This model combines the best in health care training with the best in technology,” Rogers said. “We will identify the appropriate technology solutions for OLA in order to deliver distance learning among locations in the US and Nigeria.”

NCHCI will assist the hospital in building a computer laboratory and will train OLA staff on the use of video conferencing equipment. “We want to begin the process whereby our technology at the NCHCI can leverage the video conferencing capabilities in Nigeria to link multiple locations simultaneously. Then medical experts in the US not only can instruct Nigerian family doctors where they work in rural Africa but also offer them a way to implement medical solutions and applicable technologies in a timely manner.”

According to the World Health Organization, approximately 542,000 women die from pregnancy related complications each year, with 99 percent of those deaths occurring in the developing world. Dr. Scanlon said this shows life-saving interactions that have been available in the developed world for nearly 100 years fail to take hold in many places in the developing world.

“Our approach to this breakdown is two-fold,” Dr. Scanlon said. “AIM will pay for the health care of some 500 women and their children at OLA from pregnancy through six months post-birth. The AFMED model will give family docs additional specialty medical training to increase their abilities. The care the women receive for their pregnancy and births, including the treatment of opportunistic infectious diseases, will be affordable, fair, competent and consistent. This should help us to better understand and resolve some of the technology transfer questions regarding safe-births.”

AFMED is being sponsored by the Nigerian Catholic Council of Bishops that operates some 320 health facilities and delivers approximately 40 percent of the health care in the country.
For those wanting more information or to see the progress of the Butte team in Nigeria, visit the team blog -- http://healthcareinnigeria.blogspot.com/

Maternal Life International is a Butte-based nonprofit dedicated to providing safe, practical, life-affirming, and innovative programs in AIDS prevention and care and in maternal health services. The National Center for Health Care Informatics at Montana Tech is a Montana non-profit corporation whose mission is to improve the management of data, information, and knowledge throughout healthcare.