The death of her three sisters motivated Dr. Mariam Cissé to switch from a planned career in engineering to medicine. Dr. Cissé saw her family’s inability to access timely care not just caused their loss, but was symptomatic of the overall shortcomings of the health system in Mali. She has dedicated her life to reforming health service delivery in local communities ever since.
While she has encountered other women doctors and medical leaders in Mali, Dr. Cissé noticed they were concentrated in cities and larger hospitals. Instead, she decided to work at local level in a field of greatest need, supporting culturally diverse communities with reproductive health and newborn and childhood nutrition care. Her biggest challenge and greatest success with women’s health has involved changing behaviors among community members and the midwives, doctors and nurses working at local health centers.
In 2017, Dr. Cissé joined Muso’s program team, an organization that works to end the child and maternal mortality crises and deliver Universal Health Coverage at scale. As the Urban Site Coordinator for an underserved and fast-growing neighborhood on the outskirts of Bamako, she manages programs designed to address Yirimadio’s high child mortality rate.
Under her guidance, the Innovation and Learning team at Muso have trained workers on the best practices around sexual and reproductive health. This includes increasing clinical staff numbers, introducing new working methods to work holistically with patients using appropriate and respectful consultation techniques, and reorganizing services to focus on quality care.
“If you are providing attentive and thoughtful advice, you can really improve outcomes for women and children. Things like communicating what to expect, talking to the husband or partner about what is going to happen,” she says. After seeing cases where women experiencing pregnancy symptoms treated themselves with malaria medication, Dr. Cissé introduced a focus on education and boosted prenatal consultations. She also stressed the importance of giving birth at health facilities as a way to reduce maternal and newborn mortality rates.
Prior to joining Muso, Dr. Cissé worked for a variety of community health and nutrition projects, where in over six years she trained 6,000 women as health agents, (equivalent to Community Health Workers). Under her leadership, and in a significant advance toward Universal Health Coverage in a formerly neglected area, by 2021, Muso’s health agents in Yirimadio conducted 1.6 million proactive care visits and evaluated over 15,000 children.
Following the first cases of COVID-19 in Mali in March 2020, misinformation provoked panic in Yirimadio. Dr. Cissé organized an outreach campaign to educate the community on prevention and control following WHO guidelines. When the vaccine became available, Dr. Cissé took it publicly on the first day and, given the trust she had engendered, 40 women followed her lead.
Dr. Cissé then spearheaded an immunization campaign in Yirimadio, deploying vaccinators door-to-door alongside health agents, leveraging the trust she had built in the community. The strategic pairing proved successful as the health agents alleviated anxieties facilitating the administration of thousands of vaccines. As a result, over 80% of Yirimadio’s population is vaccinated.
Dr. Cissé has devoted her life to ensuring the sadness her family experienced is not the story of many others. Her unwavering commitment to improving maternal and child health outcomes redefined what the Malian health system is capable of, and she offers the global community a positive demonstration of achieving health equity. Honoring Dr. Cissé with the Heroines of Health 2022 Award is a fitting acknowledgment for her contributions and a powerful incentive for other health workers in Mali”.
