Maternal, Newborn and Child Health

Taking Critical Services to the Home: Scaling-up Home-based Maternal and Postnatal Care, including Family Planning, through Community Midwifery in Kenya

In Kenya, with USAID support, the Population Council's FRONTIERS in Reproductive Health project supported the scale up of a model that enabled women to give birth at home or to be referred to a hospital when attended by a self-employed skilled midwife living in the community. This report describes the project and provides recommendations on skills development for the community … [Read more...] about Taking Critical Services to the Home: Scaling-up Home-based Maternal and Postnatal Care, including Family Planning, through Community Midwifery in Kenya

This report summarizes the best available evidence regarding the design and implementation of "task shifting" policies extending the use of non-medically trained primary health care workers to deliver cost-effective maternal and child health interventions. The report’s purpose is to inform deliberations and decision-making among policymakers and stakeholders. … [Read more...] about An Evidence-Based Policy Brief- Task Shifting to optimise the roles of health workers to improve the delivery of maternal and child healthcare

This article compares the demographic and health impact of deploying health service nurses and volunteers in village locations. The authors found that assigning nurses to community locations to provide basic curative and preventive care substantially reduced childhood mortality and accelerates progress towards attainment of the child survival MDG. Approaches using community … [Read more...] about Accelerating reproductive and child health programme impact with community-based services: the Navrongo experiment in Ghana

This paper describes a large-scale community-based efficacy trial of chlorhexidine for cleansing the umbilical cord conducted in rural north-eastern Bangladesh. The trial established a two-tiered system of community-based workers: paid community health workers (CHWs) and volunteer village health workers (VHWs). The community-based workers delivered a package of essential … [Read more...] about Community-based health workers achieve high coverage in neonatal intervention trials: a case study from Sylhet, Bangladesh

The East, Central and Southern Africa Health Community (ECSA-HC) in collaboration with Family Health International (FHI), held a regional workshop on expanding community-based access to family planning- focus on injectable contraception. … [Read more...] about Implementing the HMC Resolution on Task Shifting- Focus on Injectables. Evidence Review and Development of Country Workplans