Haleema Shakur Still

So we started off with a very small trial called the Wound Pharmaco TXA Trial, which was, it's a mouthful, but it's where we compared intramuscular, intravenous, and oral

We had hoped for if oral worked, that will even be better in the community.

But what we saw was that it took over an hour to reach the levels in the blood that's needed to stop bleeding.

And an hour in the life of a postpartum hemorrhage woman is a long, long time.

But the intramuscular was highly, highly...

I would say successful because it showed that within 10 minutes of administration, it already reached levels that could what we call inhibit fibrinolysis.

That's the process by which we stop bleeding.

So we had hoped at that point that the WHO would say, okay, you've compared these two ways of giving tranexamic acid.

It's a no-brainer.

We should give it intramuscularly.

But they said, no, we needed to do another big trial.

And this is where the IM woman trial came about.

For example, in trauma, in many countries now, in the UK for example, we give tranexamic acid intramuscularly for trauma.

Ambulance crews can do that already.

for postpartum hemorrhage, if we can give it intramuscularly, and the I Am Woman's trial shows that it is as good as the intravenous, that will be sort of absolutely life-changing because we can then focus on getting it into the community where people can give it intramuscularly.

Abiola has been a game changer with Ward C because up until I met Abiola, I thought I understood community engagement, but she taught me about community engagement.

the social media influencer she talked about, he did a film telling the story of a woman going into hospital and dying of postpartum haemorrhage.

The way the story was told,

I would never have told the story in that way because I didn't understand the culture.

I didn't understand how to create a message that would be understood by the culture.