Healthy mother/healthy child

The project will target its resources to the district level in selected governorates, but will also fund supportive national level activities. UNICEF, an umbrella PVO, and a TA contractor will work with the Ministry of Health (MOH) to implement the project. District health personnel, public and private, will be empowered to develop, budget, and implement plans that ensure that all households have access to an integrated package of essential reproductive and child health care services, including premarital examination and counseling; prenatal, delivery, and postnatal care; neonatal care; family planning; breastfeeding promotion; preventative child health care (immunization, nutrition, growth monitoring); sick child case management for diarrhea and acute respiratory diseases; reproductive health care; and counseling and education in all of these areas. Communities will be mobilized to assess their needs, and develop individualized action plans for their health care systems, addressing both long-term needs and short-term emergencies. The district strategy will be complemented and reinforced by long-term national interventions. The MOH will be helped to develop standards and improve supervision of the healthy mother/healthy child service package; streamline health facilities" reporting systems; support cost recovery policies; and consolidate accomplishments of the Child Survival Project (2630203). The Egyptian State Information Service will develop mass media campaigns for reproductive and child health messages and reinforce these with person-to-person counseling. Additional priorities are to: strengthen academic curricula and clinical training at medical, nursing, and pharmacology schools; increase the numbers of female practitioners (by making loans available to them); assist the public sector Health Insurance Organization (HIO); and strengthen Egyptian NGOs that have activities that support the project"s objectives.