PRESS RELEASE - ISSUED ON 7th April 2010
World Health Day - 7th April 2010

On World Health Day 2010, SOS Malta calls for ‘making adolescents a priority by investing in their health, education and livelihoods. Strengthen health systems with sexual and reproductive health as a priority. If a health system can deliver for adolescents, it is a strong health system for all.'

Maternal death and disability is one of the greatest moral, human rights and development challenges of our time and is the world's largest health inequity.

Millennium Development Goal 5 - Improve Maternal Health is achievable.....

Provide sufficient financing to strengthen health systems, particularly for maternal, childcare and other reproductive health services, and ensure that procurement and distribution of contraception, drugs and equipment are functioning.

Establish dedicated national programmes to reduce maternal mortality and ensure universal access to reproductive health care, including family planning services.

Provide trained health workers during and after pregnancy and childbirth for delivery of quality antenatal care, timely emergency obstetric services and contraception.

Ensure access to timely emergency obstetric services and provide adequate communication, skilled personnel, facilities and transportation systems, especially in areas where poverty, conflict, great distances and overloaded health systems obstruct such efforts.

Adopt and implement policies that protect poor families from the catastrophic consequences of unaffordable maternity care, including through access to health insurance or free services.

Protect pregnant women from domestic violence; and involve men in maternal health and wider reproductive health.

Increase access to contraception and sexual and reproductive health counseling for both men, women and adolescents. Increase efforts to prevent child marriage and ensure that young women postpone their first pregnancy.

The Save Womens Lives project is being funded by the European Commission in the framework of the thematic programme 'Non State Actors and Local Authorities in Development. The contents of this article are the sole responsibility of SOS Malta and can under no circumstances be regarded as reflecting the position of the European Union.


For further information, contact:
Susan Vassallo - Projects Officer, SOS Malta

Tel: 356 21244123 / 99801250
E-mail: susan.vassallo@sosmalta.org