Access to reliable information is critical to maternal and newborn health. When mothers understand what to expect during pregnancy, childbirth, and the postpartum period, they are better able to recognize warning signs and seek care at the right time and place.
Today, many women in Ghana turn to platforms such as Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram for their pregnancy and newborn care advice. Despite the digital community it has created for mothers, information shared is often not verified and can lead to the spread of misinformation, leading to delays in seeking care for mothers and babies.
Although antenatal care attendance is high in Ghana, the timing of care remains a concern. Only 41% of women aged 15–49 begin antenatal care during the first trimester, which means that many complications that could be detected early may go unnoticed until later in pregnancy.
A key driver of this challenge is a persistent information gap. In partnership with the Ghana Health Service, Jacaranda Health is helping to bridge the gap with PROMPTS, personified in Ghana as ‘Nurse Mary’. This is a two-way digital platform designed to support pregnant and postpartum mothers by sharing health information at the right time and place.
Through Nurse Mary, mothers in Ghana receive personalized health information and ask questions throughout pregnancy and after childbirth. By giving mothers direct access to reliable health guidance, the platform helps address one of the most critical barriers to maternal survival: delay in deciding to seek care caused by a lack of correct health information.
From Pilot to National Scale
Jacaranda Health has partnered with the Ghana Health Service to ensure the smooth integration of this digital platform with existing facility-based care. Using a region-by-region strategy, PROMPTS continues to strengthen existing health care systems provided by the Ghana Health Service (GHS), ensuring continuity of care from pregnancy through the postpartum period.
Since inception in the Greater Accra Region, Nurse Mary has assisted 36,500 mothers across 435 health facilities. Thus far, there has been a reported improvement in mothers recognizing danger signs, clinic attendance, and follow-up care, demonstrating the role that accessible, trusted information can play in shaping maternal health behaviors.
Our work, complemented by the text messages from PROMPTS, is better. Mothers now come to the clinic, and during our routine health talks in the morning, they bring up the SMSs they received from Nurse Mary so that we can all discuss them in detail. This intervention should be extended to other facilities so that we can work to ensure positive health outcomes for mums. – A Public Health Nurse at Ashaiman Municipal Hospital.
By working closely with the Ministry of Health to link PROMPTS with Ghana’s national health information system, we are committed to ensuring that every prenatal and postnatal mother has access to the right health information at the right time.