This project is part of the advocacy activities of We Care project.
This project is developed by Working Group (WG) “Access to healthcare services of children aged to 3, pregnant women and mothers” (WG “Health”).
The advocacy problem is focused on the access to prenatal care of uninsured pregnant women. There is an Ordinance 26 that regulates the access to prenatal care during the pregnancy of uninsured women and birth delivery at maternity wards. However, this Ordinance 26 offers limited number of medical ckeck-ups and in addition to this it is with poor implementation – recent data collected for the purposes of the current project proposal proves that there are disctricts who have reported only few pregnancy monitoring check-ups in the last three years. At the same time these districts have reported high number of birth delivery at maternity wards, covered by the same Ordinance 26.
The goal of this working group is to advocate for equal access of uninsured pregnant women to healthcare during pregnancy. To do so, the working group developed a comprehensive advocacy strategy, incl. a preliminary desk research, aiming to identify:
- Policy gaps at system level that limits the access to prenatal care of uninsured pregnant women;
- Possible solutions for system changes - review of legislative documents to identify the most realistic one to advocate for amendment so that the advocacy goal is achieved.
Therefore, the main goal of this project is to contribute to ensuring equal and effective access of uninsured pregnant women to healthcare. This goal could be achieved by amending Ordinance No 26 and equalizing the access to health services for insured and uninsured pregnant women, which in practice means increasing the number and types of medical and medical-diagnostic activities that are paid under Ordinance No. 26/2007. Achieving the set goal requires advocacy efforts for systemic change in order to ensure equal rights to monitoring a woman's pregnancy, regardless of her health insurance status. As today the babies of uninsured mothers pay the price for the missing public health policies in terms of planning and monitoring pregnancies, their chances for social realization have been reduced even before they appear in our world. This is an example of prenatal discrimination.
The current project is the practical implementation of the developed advocacy strategy. The project is structured with the following work packages (WP):
- WP “Project Management”, project leading organization: “Club of NGOs – Targovishte”
- WP “Research for evidence-based advocacy”, leading organization: “LARGO”
- WP “Communication Strategy”, leading organization: “National Network of Health Mediat