Midwives in every health facility will be my priority: Piccin

Posting midwives in every health facility will top the priorities of the new UNFPA chief in Dhaka for reducing child birth-related deaths in Bangladesh. “My job is to try and show them (government) the benefits of working and serving every single group in the country.” Argentina Piccin says she is ‘satisfied’ that Bangladesh has started midwifery training courses, but the process of creating separate posts in the health sector is “too slow” for those already trained to remember. Midwifery was like surgery, if one did not practice, they would lose the skills, she told a group of journalists on Thursday in her first media interaction after she took office in August. A Mozambique national, Piccin served as the UN population agency’s representative in Mongolia and Botswana prior to her Dhaka assignment. She joined at a time when the 20-year programme of action of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD) in Cairo ended in 2014 and a new set of plan would launch globally at the beginning of 2015. The ICPD is focused on individual’s needs and rights rather than on achieving demographic targets. It mandates the UNFPA to work on sexual and reproductive health and rights, population issues, and gender equalities in countries like Bangladesh where policymakers are shy to speak about sexual and reproductive health. Piccin said ICPD remained as “an unfinished agenda” in the world and that as a UN agency, UNFPA would continue to press for rights of all citizens in Bangladesh including lesbian, gay and transgender people. “My job is to try and show them (government) the benefits of working and serving every single group in the country.” The ICPD speaks of “universality, which means for all”, acording to a news agency.