Today, after almost three decades doing midwifery, Odette Thieophile works at Primary Health Care Services, where 220 babies are born per year. This midwife who chose her profession by vocation feels a strong commitment with women's health and remembers that the most important is a safe delivery and healthy mother and baby.
Due to this interest Thieophile, with other 39 colleagues in Dominica, participated at a training workshop to know how to use the Perinatal Information System (SIP) forms and the SIP Plus, which allows health care workers to collect data on importanhealth and social indicators. According to this midwife -who has a great deal of experience- the training will help to improve the health of mothers and newborns because “it will allow us monitoring and evaluation, tract quality of care and Facilities Diagnostic Procedures”.
Thieophile finds many SIP advantages: “Provides readily acceptable information, audit tool for work accomplished, assists in identifying gaps and need for remedial action, directs planning and programming and assists with quality assurance”.
The benefits of SIP Plus have been recognized as well by the Dominican authorities, who have decided to adopt the Perinatal Information System as the Clinical Record for Antenatal, labour and intrapartum care and newborn infant care. In this context training sessions were held in three districts of Roseau (capital of the country). During the workshops SIP forms were presented and comparison with the previous format (currently used in Dominica) of the clinical records was discussed in depth.
The SIP implementation will be discussed and decided at national level and will be adapted to the needs of the country. These trainings will help to launch it, because, as Thieophile explained: “All care providers will be involved in data collection and analysis”.
