Posted on: 5 May 2023
West Yorkshire Health and Care Partnership (WY HCP) welcomed visitors from Uganda as part of the global health programmes to the area on Thursday 27 April. The visit followed a UK East Africa Health Alliance Summit in London.
Visitors included Dr Diana Atwin, the Permanent Secretary of Health for Uganda, as well as Dr Henry Muwonge, Country Lead, Uganda UK Health Alliance and Miriam Otengo, from the Ugandan High Commission and Dr Soloman Kamurari, Head of Programmes, Uganda UK Health Alliance.
The West Yorkshire and Harrogate Local Maternity and Neonatal System have been working in collaboration with Uganda since 2021 to share good practice around high-quality, safer maternity and neonatal care for pregnant women across both countries.
The relationship has already led to the development of fifteen local maternity and neonatal systems across Uganda. These aim to strengthen multi stakeholder collaboration and resilient systems for the delivery of reproductive maternal newborn child and adolescent health services across the country, whilst making the most of shared learning with West Yorkshire and Harrogate.
Beverley Geary, WY HCP Director of Nursing said: ‘We were delighted to welcome our partners as we continue to support the implementation of the local maternity and neonatal systems across Uganda. It was a great opportunity to discuss the second phase of the programme which is all about facilitating exchange placements of maternity and neonatal staff between the two countries and importantly safe care for mums and their babies’.
Dr John Paul Bagala, Technical Officer, Safe Motherhood, Ministry of Health Uganda said: ‘The Integrated Care Board for West Yorkshire has positively supported two global engagement projects collaboratively with the Ministry of Health Uganda. First, strengthening health workforce capacity through global learning (SCALE-Neonatology) which has enabled us conduct virtual clinical webinars in neonatology between clinicians at West Yorkshire, Harrogate and Uganda coupled with the plans to start the physical professional exchanges. This will enable our clinicians to learn from our respective healthcare systems. And two, The Local Maternity and Neonatal System (LMNS) model has now been scaled up to fifteen regional facilities in Uganda. This is a clear example of the translational learning that we have leveraged from our global partnership. We remain committed to ensuring that these quick gains grow from strength to strength’.
