Health Strategies (Hansard, 20 March 2002)

§ Norman Lamb
To ask the Secretary of State for International Development what assessment she has made of the effectiveness of intervention strategies in reducing maternal mortality and morbidity in developing countries. [43998]

§ Hilary Benn
Making an effective contribution to the Millennium Development Goal of reducing maternal mortality by three quarters between 1990 and 2015 is a key objective in my Department"s Public Service Agreement.
WHO are the lead international agency and we are supporting their work to determine the most successful and cost-effective safe motherhood packages. DFID is funding research designed to identify the most effective interventions to help reduce maternal mortality and morbidity in the developing world, including trials of vitamin A supplementation and magnesium sulphate for pre-eclampsia. We are also looking to draw lessons from the large safer motherhood programmes we support in Nepal, Malawi, Kenya, Pakistan and Bolivia.
Evidence to date indicates that increasing and sustaining the quality of midwifery and obstetric services is very likely to result in reduced maternal mortality. Evidence also shows that strengthening health systems is also a key prerequisite for improving safe motherhood. DFID has committed over £1 billion to this work since 1997.

§ Norman Lamb
To ask the Secretary of State for International Development what steps she takes to (a) analyse the methods and policies by which low income countries achieve good health outcomes in life expectancy and child mortality and (b) use these countries and the methodology they apply to health policy when formulating health strategies for other developing countries. [43999]

§ Hilary Benn
DFID attaches great importance to learning and sharing lessons form successful strategies in developing countries to improve health, particularly of the poor. DFID"s ability to feed country experience into international policy making, using our network of in-country health experts, is widely recognised as one of its institutional strengths. We are further contributing to the international effort bystrengthening WHO"s capacity to draw upon country level experience, in order to set standards and disseminate best practice; supporting knowledge programmes which examine the effectiveness of interventions and disseminate best practice; and supporting the recent work of the Commission on Macroeconomics and Health, which has assessed the global evidence of the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of interventions to improve health.
Lessons learned as a result of these efforts are used to help developing countries develop and refine their own multi-sectoral national programmes and plans for better health and poverty reduction. This is increasingly done in the context of Sector Wide Approaches and Poverty Reduction Strategies.