UBOMI BUHLE means
“Life is beautiful” in isiXhosa. It serves as the acronym for the project and its intentions of Understanding Birth Outcomes for Mothers and Infants, Building Healthcare by Linking Exposures.
Understanding Birth Outcomes from Mothers and Infants – Building Healthcare by Linking Exposures
A pregnancy exposure registry (PER) in South Africa
UBOMI BUHLE means “Life is beautiful” in isiXhosa. It serves as the acronym for the project and its intentions of Understanding Birth Outcomes for Mothers and Infants, Building Healthcare by Linking Exposures.
It captures both the essence and the goal of this project of honouring and protecting life at its most critical and vulnerable moments of pregnancy and birth.
The project focuses on improving our understanding of the effects of medicines and vaccines in pregnant women to allow women to make more informed decisions about their and their babies’ health care.
Our vision is through a combination of surveillance, research, health systems strengthening and community engagement, UBOMI BUHLE strives to better understand a woman’s journey through pregnancy, specifically to understand how the medicines she takes affects her health and the health of her child. Ultimately every woman should feel empowered to make decisions about her health and the health of her child with sound knowledge about the benefits and risks of the medicines she needs and takes.
Our goal is to establish a pregnancy exposure registry (PER) in South Africa, employing a series of health system strengthening approaches to monitor the impact of medicines and other exposures in pregnancy on adverse maternal and birth outcomes.
Recognising that good science relies on quality care, the UBOMI BUHLE project has 2 key objectives in order to achieve its goal.
- To build capacity at selected sentinel surveillance sites in 3 provinces, in order to obtain reliable routine antenatal (i.e. obstetric, medical, and medicine exposure) and perinatal (labour/delivery, surface examination, and birth outcome) data in a cohort of pregnant women.
- To establish a pregnancy exposure registry (PER) through the enrolment and follow-up of a cohort of pregnant women from these sentinel sites in order to assess the impact of therapeutic interventions, such as antiretrovirals, on maternal and neonatal outcomes.
Our sub-objectives are…
- To strengthen performance in clinical record keeping for pregnant women and their newborns at sentinel sites.
- To implement a data management plan that ensures the quality, security and equitable access of data collected in the central UBOMI BUHLE pregnancy exposure registry.
- To enrol at least 18 000 women per annum from all contributing sites with a follow-up rate of at least 85% by the end of 3 years.
- To develop programmatic and research outputs aligned with the National Health Research Strategy.
- To develop and implement a stakeholder engagement plan that will support sustainability, beneficence and governmental ownership.
- To support and develop the sub-Saharan Congenital Anomaly Network (sSCAN).
- To support the national safety surveillance of HIV Pre-exposure prophylaxis use in pregnant women in South Africa.
Protecting life
It captures both the essence and the goal of this project of honouring and protecting life at its most critical and vulnerable moments of pregnancy and birth.
Understanding
The project focuses on improving our understanding of the effects of medicines and vaccines in pregnant women to allow women to make more informed decisions about their and their babies’ health care.
Through a combination of surveillance, research, health systems strengthening and community engagement, ubomi buhle strives to better understand a woman’s journey through pregnancy, specifically to understand how the medicines she takes affects her health and the health of her child. Ultimately every woman needs to feel empowered to make decisions about her health and the health of her child with sound knowledge about the benefits and risks of the medicines she needs and takes.
