Nurse-Midwife On a Mission to Prevent Preventable Diseases

Stopping preventable deaths is more than a career imperative for nurse-midwife Rafiat Akinokun – it is a personal mission.

“I grew up in a rural community in Osun state, in the southwestern region of Nigeria,” she says. “Community health nurses would come and give childhood immunizations and do a lot of health education.”

One community education campaign in particular sparked her passion for disease prevention. “I had a person close to me die of tetanus,” she recalls. “Later, when a nurse came into the community and talked about the fact that tetanus is preventable, I felt really bad. If I had known, perhaps my friend would not have died.”

So Akinokun made the decision “very early in life that I would grow up and go into nursing to help the community. When you experience loss and grief, it changes your perspective, and I don’t want anyone to go through that.”

No surprise, then, that Akinokun is one of the experts who will be supporting student and early-career nurses and midwives looking to prevent cervical cancer through immunization and other innovative practices as part of a new Global Solutions Initiative from Nursing Now Challenge and the Global HPV Consortium at Sabin Vaccine Institute. The sessions will provide student and early-career nurses and midwives with a deep dive into the prevention and treatment of HPV and cervical cancer, discussing challenges faced by nurses and midwives globally and discussing creative solutions and approaches.

Akinokun knows how valuable such a peer-to-peer perspective can be.  In 2020, she was chosen as an Immunization Advocacy Champion for the Nursing Now Challenge and advocated for immunization as a preventative measure in both professional settings and community-wide efforts. During the height of the COVID pandemic, Akinokun reduced vaccine hesitancy within the indigenous community in Ilorin, Kwara state in north-central Nigeria by utilizing health education delivered in indigenous languages to dispel myths and misinformation about the COVID-19 vaccine.

Working as a community health nurse, says Akinokun, means “I do a lot of health education. I also do immunization and family planning clinics. I go within communities to talk to them and them, trying to convince them to take vaccines and improve their knowledge of how vaccines prevent diseases.”

A large part of community engagement, she says, includes health education. “If you want to talk to women, if you want to talk to adolescent girls, it starts with educating them, getting to know their concerns.” Through her leadership with a group of volunteers, she has provided HIV health education reaching over 1500 adolescents, aligning with the Nigeria’s National HIV policy of increasing HIV education among adolescent girls from 43% to 90% by 2024.

Akinokun was part of the initial roll-out of HPV vaccines in Nigeria. “There were challenges of low accessibility. There were also challenges of a high level of unfamiliarity with the HPV vaccine. People didn’t know what it was for, and for people who find it a challenge to literally afford meals, it’s difficult to convince them to come for a vaccination. They are afraid it isn’t free, and they will have to pay for it.”

She was able to talk about these challenges with decision makers and became involved in influencing the government to introduce the HPV vaccine into required and subsidized immunization. She enjoyed interacting with people, being able to see their challenges, and also being able to communicate these challenges to decision-makers and policymakers.

To increase her own skills, Akinokun joined Sabin’s Boost community to take advantage of courses in storytelling and capacity-building. She credits the training with giving her confidence to lend her voice in high-level panel discussions and global international conferences. “I am excited to be able to bring my voice from being a community nurse working within communities to a global stage and a global level.  I feel like this is essential if we actually want to achieve health equity and different health targets globally.”

Akinokun is now completing the second of two master’s degrees – she just received a master’s in public health from the University of Sheffield in England, and is completing another in governance of health systems in transition at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. She intends to return to Nigeria and use her education to bring the voice of the community into higher levels of public health. Akinokun has a clear focus on strengthening community engagement in public health policymaking, improving healthcare access, and advocating for health system reforms that prioritize the needs of underserved populations.

“To be able to start as a nurse working within communities and then get an advanced degree, improving on myself and learning even more is a privilege,” she says. “I feel like this is really important, because I’m not starting as a top-level decision-maker. I have worked within communities, I know how the communities work, so I’m going to be able to relate and contribute to healthcare decision-making.”

And continue to work towards preventing preventable diseases.

Student and early-career nurses and midwives interested in participating in the Nursing Now Challenge Global Solutions Initiative on driving access, acceptance and uptake of HPV and Cervical Cancer Prevention Services can find more information here.