By Nusaiba Ibrahim
Every minute matters when a mother or newborn needs emergency care. Health workers’ ability to respond quickly, confidently, and as a coordinated team can make a critical difference to outcomes.
To strengthen that response, the African Centre of Excellence for Population Health and Policy (ACEPHAP) has convened a three-day TEAM-OB/NEO Training Curriculum and Package Development Workshop in Abuja, aimed at supporting a more harmonised approach to emergency maternal and newborn care in Nigeria.
The workshop brought together government stakeholders at federal and state levels, professional and regulatory councils, implementing organisations and technical partners to shape the next phase of emergency obstetric and newborn care training in the country.
The engagement was part of the TEAM-OB/NEO consortium project, led by ACEPHAP and TAConnect, with support from partners including the Clinton Health Access Initiative (CHAI), SCIDaR, HSDF, PROMPT and Laerdal. Stakeholders brought together existing evidence-based training approaches and clinical innovations, including PROMPT, SBBC, E-MOTIVE, ELSS, LSS, Basic Emergency Obstetric and Newborn Care (BEmONC), Comprehensive Emergency Obstetric and Newborn Care (CEmONC) and BORN-aligned newborn simulation content.
At the heart of the workshop was the development of a coherent, competency-based TEAM-OB/NEO training package to support health workers across different levels of care. Participants worked to harmonise training curricula and materials, emergency response sequences, practical drill pathways, simulation scenarios, competency assessments, Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs), knowledge assessments and job aids.
Discussions also went beyond the classroom. Stakeholders explored how training could translate into sustained improvements in practice through multidisciplinary teamwork, simulation-based learning, mentorship, supportive supervision, competency assessment and continuous skills reinforcement at facility level.
By bringing diverse expertise and existing approaches onto one platform, the workshop aimed to reduce fragmentation and promote greater consistency in how emergency maternal and newborn care skills are taught, assessed and reinforced across Nigeria.
Through TEAM-OB/NEO, stakeholders are working towards a more integrated and sustainable approach to emergency maternal and newborn care, with the shared goal of ensuring health workers are better prepared to respond when every second counts.
