Research to provide home-care services during pregnancy to be launched

Work on an important research to provide home-care attendants during pregnancy and postnatal services as well as effective care at birth in clinics and hospitals is to be launched in October.

The strategy, dubbed "Content and cost of community maternal-newborn care: Health Policy and Planning Series," is a multi-country economic analyses of pre/postnatal care in Ghana and five other African countries.

An LSHTM release copied to the Ghana News Agency, said the strategy is to reach universal health coverage with care at birth and prevent 300,000 maternal deaths and 5.3 million neonatal deaths and stillbirths.

Although many countries are implementing home visits, the content of care, cadres, commodities and costs all vary, which affects scaling and sustainability in systems.

This launch delivers eight papers, including the first ever multi-country analyses of community maternal newborn care involving large-scale evaluations in six African countries including five cRCTS (Ethiopia, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Ghana) and national scale-up in Malawi plus a rural, pro-poor programme in Bolivia.

Whilst all are cost-effective, the cost per visit and especially for Community Health Worker “kits” varies dramatically.

The research provides insights into factors driving the scale-ability of community-based care for other programmes such as HIV, NCDs and child development or nutrition.

The event will involve overview talks and then a talk show panel and time for discussion from the audience.

The series involved a 10 year collaboration coordinated by Professor Joy Lawn (London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (LSHTM)), and Emmanuelle Daviaud (Medical Research Council South Africa), working with a group of LSHTM and African economists, plus many partners in the countries including UNICEF, with funding mainly though Saving Newborn Lives/Save the Children.