A new maternity clinic for migrants is set to open this week at Mater Dei Hospital in an effort to improve the pregnancy success rate among immigrants.

According to Ivan Falzon, CEO of Mater Dei Hospital, the pregnancy outcome in migrants is inferior to that of the local population, with more complications and foetal losses.

The main cause, Mr Falzon explained, is inadequate utilisation of antenatal care available to these pregnant mothers, which puts both mother and child at risk.

“Many of the pregnant mig-rants miss out on an early (12 weeks) booking visit which is crucial to ascertaining the gestation of the pregnancy and to take basic antenatal blood tests,” Mr Falzon told Times of Malta, adding that the clinic will open on Thursday.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) indicates that there should be at least four antenatal visits, said Mr Falzon.

The president of Migrant Women Association Malta (MWAM), Umayma Elamin Amer, said in her experience the needs of migrant women and local community were different.

Ms Elamin Amer also highlighted that language or cultural barriers tended to be the main reasons migrant women weren’t able to benefit from antenatal care as much as the local community.

While migrant women could elect to have a cultural mediator present during their antenatal visit, some women with language barriers didn’t even understand they had an appointment, she underlined.

In addition to this, she said that, for others, antenatal appointments just weren’t the norm, and they believed that visits to the hospital were only necessary if something went wrong.

There was also the issue of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) and the lack of knowledge that persisted around the subject. 

Women who had undergone FGM often felt like they were being judged for having undergone this practice, she said.

Furthermore, there was sometimes a lack of awareness of the physical needs of these women, who tended to develop infections more easily and have more complicated childbirths.

Asked by this newspaper whether the migrant clinic was a positive or negative development in terms of integration, Ms Elamin Amer said that this was dependent on the intentions behind setting up this clinic.

“For migrant women to benefit from the maternity clinic, there needs to be more training of medical practitioners in cultural competency, and more knowledge on gender and sexual based violence, especially how it affects migrant women,” she said.

“It is also very important that more mental health support is offered to these women who may be in Malta without their families,” she continued, “and for better understanding and more appropriate care for unaccompanied migrant minors who may be pregnant.”