With a staggering rate of 512 deaths per 100,000 births (NDHS 2018) and unsafe abortions contribute over 10% of maternal deaths in Nigeria, there is no doubt that multiple approaches must be adopted to address low maternal health outcomes in Nigeria. Therefore, Ipas led the innovation of the On-the-Job Training Approach to address capacity on the delivery of Comprehensive abortion care as well as Post Abortion Care in Nigeria.
Ipas Nigeria led the pilot On-the-Job Training model in Jigawa State through partnership with the Jigawa State Ministry of Health after which the Federal Ministry of Health support was supported to develop the National On-the-Job training Manual to address maternal mortality in Nigeria.
The benefits of this approach have proved to not only increase the availability of skilled health workers, but to provide a more cost-effective training approach that improves clinical competency of trained providers when compared to historic classroom-based models.
On the job training was introduced to us Ipas. We saw that the classroom training, is very expensive, we got the support from Ipas to conduct on-the-job training for those critical health care workers, especially midwives and community health care workers in a lot of our primary health as well as some of secondary health care facilities. In a short time, we were able to train a lot of health professionals to conduct.
With the On-the-Job training, the training for healthcare workers happens in the facilities. In no time, we were able to train over 100 healthcare workers compared to when we trained people in the classrooms.
We are now using the on-the-job training to train immunization professionals, community health workers to conduct immunization activities.