The New HIV Vaccine And Microbicides Advocacy Society, NHVMAS has called on Nurses and Midwives to do more in ensuring that the mother to child transmission of HIV is reduced to its barest minimum.
This call was made by the executive director of NHVMAS, Mrs Florita Dureke while speaking at the Flag off ceremony for the celebration of Nurses and midwives at the Island Maternity Home as directed by World Health Organization.
Speaking on behalf of the society, Mrs. Florita Dureke, who decried the high rate of mother to child transmission of HIV in Nigeria asked Nurses to engage Traditional Birth Attendants, TBA’s and mission homes to make sure that no baby is born with HIV and AIDS
According to her, Nigeria was a major contributor to the number of mother to child HIV transmission Globally
“Globally, Nigeria is just contributing the larger pool of children born with HIV and AIDS so as midwives and nurses we need to do more. When we enrol people on Anti-natal we should be able to follow up to know why is it that people can’t come and have their baby’s with us, where are they going? The TDAs, the mission homes, can we do something different from our current health settings and see how we can reach out to the TDAs and the mission homes to make sure that no baby is born in Nigeria with HIV,” she said.
Further expressing her dissatisfaction with the state in which Nigeria is in the fight against mother to child HIV and Aids transmission she said “personally use to weep when I look at this data because countries like Botswana has lived about this.”
Also speaking at the event was the founder of SID initiative who drew the attention of the nurses to understanding policies and policy advocacy.
It will be recalled that the Executive Board, of the World Health Organization in January 2019 designated the year 2020 as the “Year of the Nurse and midwife”, in honor of the 200th birth anniversary of Florence Nightingale.
Earlier, David Ita 2019 AVAC Fellow under the AVAC Fellowship program currently hosted by NHVMAS gave the welcome message.
The event was hosted by Young Midwifery Leader Olajumoke Adebayo in order to build the capacities of midwives in policy advocacy to ensure advocacy for better policies to improve maternal and child health in Nigeria.