Maternal and Newborn Health, Exploring Shared Solutions for Common Goals

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A recent post on Impatient Optimists by Gary Darmstadt and Vishwajeet Kumar addressed the question, “Can newborn health care help mothers, too?” They wrote about a recent study, Community-driven impact of a newborn-focused behavioral intervention on maternal health in Shivgarh, India, that aimed to assess the effect on maternal health outcomes of a community-based essential newborn care behavior change intervention.

Maternal health programs often fail to integrate with programs for delivering care to children and then to measure the impact on both newborn and child health outcomes as well as maternal health outcomes. Similarly, child health programs often fail to integrate maternal health care into their plans.

There is reason to be hopeful, however.

In the Shivgarh community of Uttar Pradesh, India, the Gates Foundation supported a community-based program centered on promoting preventive newborn care by empowering families and communities. Though the program did not focus on maternal health, what we found was fascinating and pushed us to delve deeper into the connections between maternal and newborn/child health care.

Read the full post here.