4.1  Home visits: the best opportunity to provide postnatal care

The ideal way to provide maternal and child health services is through health care delivered by skilled personnel in a health facility. However in Ethiopia there are many challenges to achieving this goal, such as shortage of trained health workers and facilities, and difficulties of access for rural populations to facility-based health care – including postnatal care.

It may take many years to solve all these challenges. Therefore, while working hard to strengthen the health system and improve access to facility-based care in rural communities, your current role as a Health Extension Practitioner is to focus on home visits for the delivery of postnatal care.