In the late 1840′s, Dr. Ignaz Semmelweis was an assistant in the maternity wards of a Vienna hospital. He noted with alarm that the mortality rate in a delivery room staffed by medical students was up to three times higher than in a second delivery room staffed by midwives. Women were terrified, and rightly so, of the room staffed by the medical students where up to twenty five percent of women died of ‘childbed fever’.
Semmelweis observed that the students were coming straight from their lessons in the autopsy room to the delivery room. In a flash of insight (obvious to us today), he surmised that the students might be carrying the infection from their dissections to birthing mothers.
After ordering doctors and medical students to wash their hands before examining women in labor the mortality rate in his maternity wards eventually dropped to less than one percent!
What needs to change in your ministry to kids?
