Helping the Helpers: Skills Training and Mental Health Support for PAC Providers in Yemen

This innovation addresses two barriers to quality post-abortion care (PAC) in Yemen: the inadequate PAC training and the lack of mental health support for those providing this service. A 2019 BMC Public Health study found that 63.2% of doctors surveyed in Yemen are experiencing a high degree of burnout (defined as emotional exhaustion, increased depersonalization, and a diminished sense of personal accomplishment due to chronic emotional stress). This percentage is likely to be higher for PAC providers, who face significant social stigma for the services they perform. Clinically, providers are mostly trained to offer dilatation and curettage (D&C), an outdated and less effective method of PAC provision, as opposed to the safer manual vacuum aspiration (MVA) method. As the risk of maternal death is 90 times higher in fragile states than in a regular context, safe and high-quality PAC provision in Yemen needs improving.