What is the name of your organization?
Maternity Foundation
What is the name of your solution?
The Safe Delivery App (SDA)
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
Educating midwives through intelligent, interactive, and evidence-based micro-learning to provide quality care
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
København, Danmark
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
Denmark
What type of organization is your solution team?
Nonprofit
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
Every other minute, a woman dies of causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. Every 14th second, a newborn suffers the same fate. Global targets aims to reduce the maternal mortality rate to 70 deaths per 100,000 life births, however since 2015 progress towards reducing maternal deaths has stalled.
The vast majority of maternal deaths can be prevented with access to care delivered by a competent midwife. However, data shows that there is a global need of 900,000 midwives to ensure universal healthcare by 2030. Additionally, there are glaring gaps in midwives' knowledge, skills, and confidence, and the opportunities for professional development are often sparse in the most remote and fragile settings. To address the global need for ensuring safer births in the world's most fragile settings, the Safe Delivery App supports, educates, and enables midwives in an innovative way so that they will deliver respectful and quality maternal care and ensure safer births for mothers and newborns.
What is your solution?
Maternity Foundation strengthens the knowledge, skills, and confidence of midwives through innovative learning and training programs. At the centre of our work is the Safe Delivery App. Opposite traditional classroom training, the App brings professional development and on-the-job-support into the hands of midwives for them to access whenever it is needed. The App brings WHO-aligned clinical guidelines through simple micro-learning to engage and utilize to support midwives and other healthcare professionals in providing quality preventive, routine, and emergency care. There is clear global evidence on the positive impact of the Safe Delivery App on the knowledge, skills and confidence. The App is free and once downloaded, it works offline on smartphones and tablets which makes it a fully functioning job-aid in particularly remote settings. It covers over 20 maternal health topics and is available in 5 Global Versions (English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Arabic) and more than 30 other language versions adapted to national contexts and needs.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Our solution serves midwives and others who do midwifery work. Midwives play a critical role in addressing and reducing maternal mortality in low- and middle-income countries. However, lack of investments in midwifery education, minimal opportunities for continuous professional development, poor facility management, and experience of professional disrespect mean that there persists a gap in midwifery skills and knowledges globally.
We provide midwives with easily accessible digital professional job-aid, so midwives can educate themselves on their own premises and access locally adapted content that is relevant for them specifically. Evidence shows that micro-learning and gamified day-to-day training increases knowledge retention, and midwives are therefore able to improve their knowledge, skills, and confidence more sustainably by using the App as part of their continued professional development as well as day-to-day work.
By further improving the App and growing its technological capabilities, the solution will be able to provide more personalized and interactive learning mechanisms that easily adapts to each users' needs, learning patterns and behaviours. This will in turn fully realize the midwives' professional capacity, which in the end will ensure more safer births.
