OTHER FORMS OF SUPPORT FOR PREGNANT WOMEN

Other forms of support for pregnant women that can help address stunting include Flourish mom and baby classes, Grow Great Champions and the PMHP maternal support service.

Flourish

Flourish, a Grow Great initiative, helps parents provide responsive caregiving to their children through a rapidly growing national network of affordable and evidence-based mom and baby classes. It is a social franchise that offers a community of support for new and expectant mothers. It empowers and equips them with the skills and information they need to care for themselves and provide nurturing care to their child in the critical first 1 000 days. Since its inception more than 26 000 moms have been reached.

Grow Great Champions

Grow Great Champions (GGCs) is an initiative that catalyses Community Health Workers (CHWs) to be “Grow Great Champions” who support parents and children. They focus on maternal and child health, growth and early childhood development in the first 1 000 days of a child’s life. In several developing countries, where significant reductions in stunting have been achieved, CHWs have been central to these countries’ stunting reduction strategies. If one considers that a healthy child typically only interacts with the health system for 20 of the first 1 000 days, a strategy that includes interacting with the child and primary caregiver in the home is critical to the prevention of stunting. There are currently more than 2 000 GGC-trained CHWs operating in four provinces who have supported more than 125 000 children.

Maternal support service

For 12 years, PMHP has provided a maternal support service at the Hanover Park Midwife Obstetric Unit. Women visiting this unit come from Hanover Park and surrounding areas and face extremely high levels of social and economic hardship. The service design has recently changed to increase efficiency; shifting from a universal screening approach to providing targeted screening to adolescents, women with HIV, women experiencing violence and women deemed at-risk by the unit’s staff.