Federal government websites often end in. The site is secure. Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October Learn More or Try it out now. Beyond the direct effects on women and newborns, 1 the COVID pandemic has resulted in large, multidimensional and ongoing negative indirect effects on the provision of sexual, reproductive, maternal and newborn health.
Many of these have resulted in unnecessary deviations from timely, evidence-based, respectful care for example, routine separation of newborns from COVID positive mothers, lack of support for breastfeeding, denial of abortion care, suspension of reproductive cancer screening activities. Maintaining timely and high-quality essential services during the past months has been a herculean task, often dependent on individuals and teams from different organisations who have adapted work processes, human resources, guidelines, physical spaces, and communication channels in order to continue providing care, and at the same time documenting and advocating for attention to these issues.
However, many of these problems were predictable. Examples include the inability or unwillingness of some countries to send assistance such as personal protective equipment to other affected countries, as well as the heavy disruption of transportation and distribution channels of key commodities produced in a few global locations e.
The novelty of the disease, heterogeneous nature of the epidemic across countries, and urgency of mitigation actions gave rise to a wide range of challenges, and resulted in a proliferation of local, context-specific and adapted solutions. However, the problems have been documented better than the solutions, which have not been retained or shared sufficiently.
Yet, the smallest of such fixes or solutions can be insightful to others facing similar problems, even if thousands of kilometres away. More so, they can give us an opportunity to see the underlying problems and weak links in a new light, garner energy to tackle both immediate and long-standing barriers and bottle-necks with a renewed spirit, and to coalesce around a future which is better than the pre-COVID era.
