Without proper training and practice, midwives cannot provide high quality maternal and newborn care. Maternity Foundation’s Safe Delivery App aims to enhance midwives’ skills and knowledge in order to improve the quality of care women receive. The Safe Delivery App is a mobile health training tool that provides midwives working in remote, low-resource settings with access to evidence-based clinical guidelines and animated instructions, helping them to prevent and manage obstetric emergencies…read more
Communities Demanding Quality Maternity Care
Posted onGeorge Nkhoma is a midwife in Malawi. Growing up without a mother – because she died while giving birth to him – has made George passionate about the state of maternal and newborn care in the country. The zealous midwife is now an advocate for Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn, Child and Adolescent Health (RMNCAH) for White Ribbon Alliance (WRA) in Malawi, and his community recognizes him as being exemplary in his work as he is very helpful and, unlike other midwives, treats them with respect. But George is often seen as the exception…read more
New “Quality of Maternal Health Care” Blog Series: Call for Submissions
Posted onThe quality of care a woman receives during pregnancy, delivery and postpartum affects her health, the health of her child and the likelihood that she will seek health care in the future. The MHTF is thrilled to announce our new blog series, “Quality of Maternal Health Care”. If you are working on something related to quality of maternal health care, or if you want to share a unique perspective on this topic, please submit your blog post to us…read more
Improving Quality of Antenatal Care: New Guidelines From the World Health Organization (WHO)
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The World Health Organization has released a new set of antenatal care recommendations to improve maternal and perinatal health worldwide. The guidelines seek to reduce the global burden of stillbirths, reduce pregnancy complications and provide all women and adolescents with a positive pregnancy experience…read more
Implementing a Clinical Quality Dashboard in Low-Resource Maternal and Child Health Hospital
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Clinical quality dashboards equip hospitals with a simple method for maintaining and monitoring clinical quality. Learn about the importance of measurement and evaluation in a health care setting, the process of creating a clinical quality dashboard in a low-resource maternity hospital and lessons learned during the creation, implementation and evaluation of the dashboard…read more
Ensuring Quality in Private Maternity Care
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One of the most challenging areas of maternal health is measuring, improving and assuring quality of care. Measuring the quality of maternal health care can be particularly difficult, especially surrounding labor and delivery. Maternal mortality and morbidity outcomes can be misleading indicators of quality, and data on the content of care is extremely limited. For private maternity care providers, investing in continuous quality measurement and improvement can be a real hurdle. Particularly for small, independent providers, time is money and taking on complex, continuous quality improvement processes is unrealistic. However, our experience working with private providers demonstrates that they are eager to invest in quality improvement measures…read more
How Good Are Our Current Measures for Maternal Health Care Quality?
Posted onThe public health community has emphasized the importance of quality of maternal health care, noting that increasing access to care alone is not sufficient for improving maternal health outcomes. Many of the maternal health quality of care indicators currently used around the world have not yet been validated, which means that we may not be measuring what really matters. Researchers have demonstrated a lack of correlation between quality measures and maternal mortality. The challenge is how to capture the quality of maternal health care in diverse settings across the globe: What factors are important, and how can those factors be measured accurately? In an effort to answer that question, the Maternal Health Task Force (MHTF) partnered with colleagues at the Population Council to evaluate current measures of maternal health care quality…read more
Not All Facilities Are Created Equal: The Relationship Between Delivery Volume, Surgical Capacity and Quality of Maternal Health Care in Africa
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In a recent study published in The Lancet Global Health, Kruk and colleagues used nationally representative health system surveys to examine the quality of maternal health care provided in facilities in Kenya, Namibia, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda in relation to volume of deliveries and surgical capacity. Quality of care was evaluated using a set of indicators that measured the facility’s availability of 24-hour skilled staff, referral system, electricity, safe water, equipment for infection control, and ability to administer oxytocin, antibiotics and magnesium sulfate when necessary…read more
Improving Quality of Care for Mothers and Newborns in Health Facilities: New Standards and Measures From the World Health Organization (WHO)
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To combat preventable perinatal morbidity and mortality, the World Health Organization (WHO) recently published a framework for measuring and improving quality of maternal and newborn health care in facilities across the globe. The framework includes eight standards of high quality care and a comprehensive list of measures to identify quality gaps throughout the continuum of care for women and newborns…read more
Promoting Respectful Maternity Care in Tanzania
Posted onDisrespect and abuse during childbirth has been observed and recorded all around the world. In addition to being a human rights violation, disrespect and abuse during childbirth discourages women who experience it from seeking health care in the future and ultimately results in poor health outcomes. As a result, a number of organizations, including the World Health Organization (WHO), have called for improved measurement, programs and advocacy addressing this global issue. With support from The John and Katie Hansen Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Maternal Health Task Force (MHTF) established a research project to measure the prevalence of disrespect and abuse during childbirth in Tanzania and Ethiopia and to develop effective interventions…read more