Professors Jody Lori and Carol Boyd to Evaluate Maternity Waiting Homes in Liberia

Project funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development to Africare hopes to reduce maternal mortality.

School of Nursing professors Jody Lori and Carol Boyd will soon embark on a trip to Liberia to help explore effective methods of reducing maternal mortality through maternity waiting homes. Several of these homes are under construction, and the goal is, through their improved accessibility to rural parts of the country, to have more mothers give birth with the aid of a professional nurse or nurse-midwife. Lori and Boyd will collect data on the efficacy of this measure, and that data will be compared that of clinics without any such homes in proximity.

The waiting home project is funded by a $1.75 million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development to Africare. Lori and Boyd are signed on to a four-year contract working with the project to continue to assess its effectiveness. They are currently assembling a student team to assist in data delivery and analysis, with students from the Schools of Nursing, the Medical School, and a College of Engineering graduate.

More details about this initiative can be read here.