Secure pregnancy

Self-care-program for pregnant women

Mrs. Ulrike A.:
Because of a vaginal infection which was detected too late, my son Max was delivered at 24 weeks and is now severely visually impaired. In my second pregnancy I participated at the Self-Care-Program for pregnant women. Because of the elevated vaginal pH levels I realized that something was not OK. I immediately saw my doctor who diagnosed and immediately treated a vaginal infection. Consequently my daughter Sabine was delivered in best health at 37 weeks.

The major focus of our work is the Self-Care-Program for pregnant women. We recommend that pregnant women measure their vaginal pH. This helps, much earlier than usual, in the recognition and early intervention of indicators of early vaginal infections, the most frequent cause of preventable preterm births.

At an affordable price we provide pregnant women with test gloves for this simple and risk-free self-evaluation. In addition, they receive information on pregnancy precautions and how to recognize warning signs in good time.

We want to ensure that this self-care is also available to women of lower socioeconomic status who are especially at risk for preterm births. Up to now about 9000 women have participated in our program.

Our success rates are significant. Through our Self-Care-Program we were able to decrease the rates of babies born under 1000 grams from 3.9 % in prior pregnancies to 0.9 % in the present pregnancy.

Prof. Hoyme was also able to significantly lower prematurity rates with our program in the whole state of Thuringia (Germany).

Prevention is better – and it saves money

In Germany over 1 billion Euro is spent each year for the care of pregnant women with threatened preterm birth and the care of preterm newborns – excluding follow-up care like special support of preterm infants. But the real effect of preterm births cannot be shown in numbers alone: More significant is the suffering of the affected children and their families.

Read more about the Self-Care-Program for pregnant women

Glove for pH-Self detection