Project profile — Scaling Up Maternal and Child Health in Guatemala

The expected outcomes for the project include: (1) improved delivery of essential health services to mothers, pregnant women, newborns and children under five; and (2) increased collection, dissemination, and use of community-level maternal, newborn and child health and nutrition health data

Results achieved by the Tula Foundation through the support of the Government of Canada as of the end of the project (December 2021) include: (1) contributed to the reduction of maternal mortality rate by an average of 23% in Alta Verapaz, El Quiché, Huehuetenango and Sololá; (2) reduced the number of deaths of children under the age of five by an average of 71% in target regions; (3) 29,637 health personnel and community health workers (16,989 women and 12,648 men, including 19,621 Indigenous persons) completed distance education programs to address maternal, newborn and child health and nutrition; (4) provided training for 4,981 community health workers and health personnel participants (2,775 women and 2,206 men) in Alta Verapaz, El Quiché, Huehuetenango, and Sololá and smartphone equipment to enhance their capacity to use a community eHealth system to improve the delivery of maternal, newborn and child health, nutrition health and COVID-19 services; (5) the registration of more than 1.8M calls for clinical support such as transport, follow-up, consultation and coordination; (6) contributed to an increased collection, dissemination and use of community-level maternal, newborn and child health and nutrition health data. Since the beginning of the project, (7) 7,694 health officials, health personnel and community health workers (4,301 women and 3,393 men) accessed community health information for decision-making support via the community eHealth system; (8) coordinated with the Ministry of Health in 2020 to update the eHealth system to allow users to register COVID-19 cases for monitoring, follow-up and resources planning; and (9) This improved the time required to access information. The average transfer time between collection and accessibility of health data by the community eHealth system records at approximately 21 minutes; significantly better than the project target of 24 hours.