“Patient-centered” means that health care providers, and the system they practice within, accept that the values, culture, choices, and preferences of a woman and her family are relevant within the context of promoting optimal health outcomes. The overarching principles involved include treating all childbearing women with kindness, respect, dignity, and cultural sensitivity, throughout their m...

OBJECTIVE Measuring the quality of inpatient obstetrical care using quality indicators is becoming increasingly important for both patients and healthcare providers. However, there is no consensus about which measures are optimal. We describe a modified Delphi method to identify a set of indicators for continuously monitoring the quality of maternity care by healthcare professionals. METHODOL...

The aim of the present study was to evaluate the effect of an essential newborn care (ENC) training programme for maternity ward staff in improving newborn care practices after hospital discharge. A before-and-after study was conducted in the community involving mothers who had given birth in two hospitals in the Puttalam district in Sri Lanka. The intervention was a 4-day training programme an...

A functioning referral system is generally considered to be a necessary element of successful Safe Motherhood programmes. This paper draws on a scoping review of available literature to identify key requisites for successful maternity referral systems in developing countries, to highlight knowledge gaps, and to suggest items for a future research agenda. Key online social science, medical and h...

Introduction: A Midwifery Trained Registered Nurse (MTRN) is a member of the multi-professional maternity health care team in Sri Lanka. Her contribution to the maternity care team is poorly understood, often undermined, and undefined. In the context of low- and middle-income settings where traditional midwives play a crucial role in domiciliary care, the MTRNs role as a member of the multi-pro...

A central issue in designing incentive contracts is the decision to reward agents’ input use versus outputs. The trade-off between risk and return innovation production can also lead agents with varying skill levels perform differentially under different contracts. We study this experimentally, observing verifying inputs outputs Indian maternity care. find that both contract types achieve compa...

BACKGROUND The paucity of human resources for health buoyed by excessive workloads has been identified as being responsible for poor quality obstetric care, which leads to high maternal mortality in Nigeria. While there is anecdotal and qualitative research to support this observation, limited quantitative studies have been conducted to test the association between the number and density of hum...

Purpose A majority of women use complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) during pregnancy yet many are not under the care of a qualified CAM practitioner nor inform their primary healthcare clinician of their CAM use. Most conventional maternity carers do not receive training in CAM as part of their formal education and many CAM practitioners do not gain training in order to collaborate eff...

BACKGROUND In the Netherlands, midwives are autonomous medical practitioners and 78% of pregnant women start their maternity care with a primary care midwife. Scientific research to support evidence-based practice in primary care midwifery in the Netherlands has been sparse. This paper describes the research design and methodology of the multicenter multidisciplinary prospective DELIVER study w...