Bangladesh's Health Minister, Sardar Md Sakhawat Hossain, has repeated the government's pledge to raise health spending step by step to 5 per cent of gross domestic product and to hire 25,000 midwives into the public health system over the next few years.
He made the commitment on Sunday, 11 October, at a ministerial round table in Berlin, Germany, titled "Accelerating midwifery and South-South partnership for health security: from crisis to resilience".
Midwives are central to safe, dignified and life-saving care for mothers and newborns, the minister said: antenatal care, safe delivery, emergency referral and postnatal care all improve through them. The government, he said, treats money spent on midwives not as a cost but as a national investment that cuts maternal and newborn deaths and lowers overall health spending.
To raise the standard of midwifery education, the infrastructure of 62 institutions in the country is being modernised, he said, alongside hands-on training, simulation-based learning and technology-based teaching.
Stressing regional cooperation to tackle the shortage of health workers, he said Bangladesh is strengthening knowledge and teacher exchanges and joint training with Nepal and Pakistan. He praised development partners, the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in particular, for their support to maternal and reproductive health services.
The minister also pointed to midwives' work in climate-related disasters and in the humanitarian response for Rohingya refugees in Cox's Bazar, where they keep life-saving maternal care going through crises. The government remains committed to building their skills and investing in the profession, he said.
Photo: Conor Ashleigh for AusAID (Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 4.0)
Source: Bangladesh Times
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