Meredith Jean-Baptiste

Meredith Jean-Baptiste

We have more women coming in asking for the method than ever before as a result
– Meredith Jean-Baptiste

In rural Mirebalais, Haiti, women have long received family planning counseling after giving birth at the University Hospital – but were rarely going home with contraceptives. These new mothers, who typically live long distances from the facility, were asked to schedule follow-up appointments to receive implants and other long-acting reversible contraceptives. But it was too hard for women to make the trek back. So many didn’t return until the following year – not for family planning, but to again give birth.
Meredith Jean-Baptiste, a nurse-midwife, wanted to change that. She was tired of seeing women die or suffer preventable complications because they were unable to delay and space births at healthy intervals. The use of long-acting reversible contraceptives was low at her hospital and she wondered if it was because the staff weren’t properly trained. Jean-Baptiste set out create a curriculum to remedy that, using the Training Resource Package for Family Planning managed by K4Health – and already translated into French – as her guide. She even created her own instructional video on implant insertion. Her goal: Help her staff make it easy for women to get an implant before they and their new babies ever left the hospital.
In March 2016, she held three trainings, leading her colleagues through pretests, lectures, presentations, case studies, a practicum where trainees inserted implants into dummies, and, finally, supervised insertion of implants into patients. Whereas before the training almost no women received implants after they gave birth at University Hospital, now 21 percent of women who deliver there go home with a long-acting or permanent contraceptive method, most with an implant.
“We have more women coming in asking for the method than ever before as a result,” Jean-Baptiste says.