to women through community mobilization and home visits during pregnancy versus standard care (EB Table E.4.2)
The evidence on the effects of community mobilization and antenatal home visits was synthesized from data derived from a Cochrane review of health system and community-level interventions for improving ANC coverage and health outcomes (175). Four large cluster-RCTs conducted in rural Bangladesh, India and Pakistan contributed data on packages of interventions involving community mobilization and antenatal home visits versus no intervention (192–195). Health system
strengthening occurred in both the intervention and control groups in two of the trials. The focus of these packages was generally to promote maternal health education, ANC attendance and other care-seeking behaviour, tetanus toxoid vaccinations and iron and folic acid supplements, and birth and newborn-care preparedness. Household visits were performed by trained lay health workers and consisted of at least two visits during pregnancy.
In two trials, these visits were targeted to occur at 12–16 weeks of gestation and 32–34 weeks; in one trial, these visits both occurred in the third trimester;
and in the fourth trial the timing of the visits was not specified. Multilevel community mobilization strategies included advocacy work with community stakeholders (community leaders, teachers, and
WHO recommendations on antenatal care for a positive pregnancy experience
other respected members), TBAs, husbands or partners, and households (husbands or partners, women, and other family members). Two intervention packages included group education sessions for women focusing on key knowledge and behaviour around pregnancy and early neonatal care, including promotion of ANC and other health education. One intervention package included husband education via booklets and audio cassettes. Training of TBAs to recognize common obstetric and newborn emergencies was a component of three intervention packages. In one trial, telecommunication systems with transport linkages were also set up as part of the intervention package. In another trial, community health committees were encouraged to establish an emergency transport fund and use local vehicles, in addition to advocacy work, household visits and women’s meetings.
Maternal outcomes
Moderate-certainty evidence indicates that
intervention packages with community mobilization and antenatal home visits probably have little or no effect on maternal mortality (2 trials; RR: 0.76, 95%
CI: 0.44–1.31).
Fetal and neonatal outcomes
Moderate-certainty evidence indicates that
intervention packages with community mobilization and antenatal home visits probably reduce perinatal mortality (3 trials; RR: 0.65, 95% CI: 0.48–0.88).
Coverage outcomes
High-certainty evidence shows that intervention packages with community mobilization and antenatal home visits improve ANC coverage of at least one visit (4 trials; RR: 1.76, 95% CI: 1.43–2.16). However, moderate-certainty evidence indicates that they probably have little or no effect on ANC coverage of at least four visits (1 trial; RR: 1.51, 95% CI: 0.50–
4.59) or facility-based birth (3 trials; RR: 1.46, 95%
CI: 0.87–2.46).
Additional considerations n
n The GDG also considered evidence on antenatal home visits as a stand-alone intervention, but did not make a separate recommendation on this intervention due to the lack of evidence of benefits related to the ANC guideline outcomes.
In brief, evidence of moderate- to high-certainty suggests that stand-alone antenatal home visits have little or no effect on ANC visit coverage of at least four visits (4 trials; RR: 1.09, 95% CI:
0.99–1.22), facility-based birth (4 trials; RR: 1.08, 95% CI: 0.87–1.35), perinatal mortality (4 trials;
RR: 0.91, 95% CI: 0.79–1.05) and preterm birth (1 trial; RR: 0.88, 95% CI: 0.54–1.44) (see Web supplement).
n
n The 2013 WHO recommendations on postnatal care of the mother and newborn include the following recommendation:
“Home visits in the first week after birth are recommended for care of the mother and newborn (strong recommendation based on high-quality evidence for newborns and low-quality evidence for mothers).” This recommendation is accompanied by the remark “Depending on the existing health system in different settings, these home visits can be made by midwives, other skilled providers or well trained and supervised CHWs [community health workers]” (196).
n
n The 2011 WHO guidelines on Preventing early pregnancy and poor reproductive outcomes among adolescents in developing countries strongly recommend the following in relation to the outcome “Increase use of skilled antenatal, childbirth and postnatal care among adolescents”:
–n“Provide information to all pregnant adolescents and other stakeholders about the importance of utilizing skilled antenatal care.”
–n“Provide information to all pregnant adolescents and other stakeholders about the importance of utilizing skilled childbirth care.”
–n“Promote birth and emergency preparedness in antenatal care strategies for pregnant adolescents (in household, community and health facility settings)” (197).
n
n Several WHO recommendations included in the 2015 WHO recommendations on health promotion interventions for maternal and newborn health are relevant to community-based interventions to improve communication and support for women during pregnancy (198) – these are presented in Box 3.
Values
See “Women’s values” at the beginning of section 3.E:
Background (p. 86).
Resources
A systematic review of the cost–effectiveness of strategies to improve the utilization and provision of maternal and newborn health care in low- and lower-middle-income countries reported that there was reasonably strong evidence for the
Box 3: Relevant recommendations from the 2015 WHO recommendations on health promotion interventions for maternal and newborn health
Recommendation 1: Birth preparedness and complication readiness interventions are recommended to increase the use of skilled care at birth and to increase the timely use of facility care for obstetric and newborn complications. (Strong recommendation, very low-quality evidence.)
Recommendation 2: Interventions to promote the involvement of men during pregnancy, childbirth and after birth are recommended to facilitate and support improved self-care of women, improved home care practices for women and newborns, and improved use of skilled care during pregnancy, childbirth and the postnatal period for women and newborns. (Strong recommendation, very low-quality evidence.) These interventions are recommended provided that they are implemented in a way that respects, promotes and facilitates women’s choices and their autonomy in decision-making, and supports women in taking care of themselves and their newborns. In order to ensure this, rigorous monitoring and evaluation of implementation is recommended.
Recommendation 3 on interventions to promote awareness of human, sexual and reproductive rights and the right to access quality skilled care: Because of the paucity of evidence available, additional research is recommended.
The GDG supports, as a matter of principle, the importance for MNH programmes to inform women about their right to health and to access quality skilled care, and to continue to empower them to access such care.
Recommendation 6 on partnership with traditional birth attendants (TBAs): Where TBAs remain the main providers of care at birth, dialogue with TBAs, women, families, communities and service providers is recommended in order to define and agree on alternative roles for TBAs, recognizing the important role they can play in supporting the health of women and newborns. (Strong recommendation, very low-quality evidence.) Recommendation 7: Ongoing dialogue with communities is recommended as an essential component in defining the characteristics of culturally appropriate, quality maternity care services that address the needs of women and newborns and incorporate their cultural preferences. Mechanisms that ensure women’s voices are meaningfully included in these dialogues are also recommended. (Strong recommendation, very low-quality evidence.) Recommendation 11: Community participation in quality-improvement processes for maternity care services is recommended to improve quality of care from the perspectives of women, communities and health-care providers.
Communities should be involved in jointly defining and assessing quality. Mechanisms that ensure women’s voices are meaningfully included are also recommended. (Strong recommendation, very low-quality evidence.)
Recommendation 12: Community participation in programme planning, implementation and monitoring is recommended to improve use of skilled care during pregnancy, childbirth and the postnatal period for women and newborns, increase the timely use of facility care for obstetric and newborn complications and improve maternal and newborn health. Mechanisms that ensure women’s voices are meaningfully included are also recommended.
(Strong recommendation, very low-quality evidence.) Source: WHO, 2015 (198).
cost–effectiveness of the use of PLA cycles (199).
Estimated costs per life saved for PLA cycle
interventions alone was US$ 268 and for community mobilization combined with home visits during pregnancy and/or health system strengthening, costs ranged from US$ 707 to US$ 1489 per death averted. However, costs of these interventions are difficult to estimate and depend on context.
Costing must also take into account the facilitators’
time, training and supervision; these elements are considered key to the quality of implementation and the success of the intervention.
Equity
Interventions such as PLA cycles, community mobilization and home visits during pregnancy are a way of facilitating dialogue and action with, and empowering, disadvantaged populations to engage in efforts to improve health and to strengthen broader community support. The women’s groups PLA cycles, in particular, were conducted in marginalized areas where other support mechanisms often do not exist.
Interventions to engage male partners/husbands and others in the community to support women to make healthy choices for themselves and their children
WHO recommendations on antenatal care for a positive pregnancy experience
may help to address inequalities. However, when engaging men, it is important to consider women’s preferences, as including male partners could also have a negative effect for women who would prefer to discuss pregnancy-related and other matters without their partner’s involvement.
Acceptability
Qualitative evidence suggests that women in a variety of settings and contexts readily engage with interventions designed to increase communication and support, provided they are delivered in a caring and respectful manner (high confidence in the evidence) (22). The use of women’s groups is likely to fulfil two key requirements of ANC from a woman’s perspective – the opportunity to receive and share relevant information and the opportunity to develop supportive relationships with other women and health-care providers (high confidence in the evidence). Evidence from women and providers in LMICs also highlighted the importance of active community engagement in the design and delivery of informational-based services, especially in communities where traditional beliefs may differ from conventional understandings (moderate confidence in the evidence). Qualitative
evidence from providers suggests that there is a willingness to supply pregnancy-related information and offer psychological/emotional support to women provided that resources are available (high confidence in the evidence) and the services are delivered in a coordinated, organized manner with appropriate managerial support (moderate confidence in the evidence) (45).
Feasibility
Qualitative evidence suggests that, where health-care providers are involved in facilitating women’s groups, they may need additional training to help with the facilitative components and this may be a barrier in some resource-poor settings (high confidence in the evidence). Similarly, the extra costs associated with home visits in terms of additional staff and extra resources may limit implementation in some LMICs (high confidence in the evidence) (45). It has been suggested that community-based interventions introduced through existing public sector health workers and local health systems may be more feasible and more likely to succeed than project-based interventions (200).
E.5: Task shifting components of antenatal care delivery
RECOMMENDATION E.5.1: Task shifting the promotion of health-related behaviours for
maternal and newborn healtha to a broad range of cadres, including lay health workers, auxiliary nurses, nurses, midwives and doctors is recommended. (Recommended)
RECOMMENDATION E.5.2: Task shifting the distribution of recommended nutritional
supplements and intermittent preventive treatment in pregnancy (IPTp) for malaria prevention to a broad range of cadres, including auxiliary nurses, nurses, midwives and doctors is
recommended. (Recommended)
Remarks
• Recommendations E.5.1 and E.5.2 have been adapted and integrated from Optimizing health worker roles to improve access to key maternal and newborn health interventions through task shifting (OptimizeMNH) (2012) (201).
• The GDG noted that, while task shifting has an important role to play in allowing flexibility in health-care delivery in low-resource settings, policy-makers need to work towards midwife-led care for all women.
• Lay health workers need to be recognized and integrated into the system, and not be working alone, i.e.
task shifting needs to occur within a team approach.
• The mandate of all health workers involved in task shifting programmes needs to be clear.
• In a separate guideline on HIV testing services (98), WHO recommends that lay providers who are trained and supervised can independently conduct safe and effective HIV testing using rapid tests (see Recommendation B.1.8).
• The GDG noted that it may be feasible to task shift antenatal ultrasound to midwives with the appropriate training, staffing, mentoring and referral systems in place.
• Further research is needed on the mechanism of effect of MLCC and whether continuity of care can be task shifted.
• Further information on this recommendation can be found in the OptimizeMNH guideline (201), available at: http://www.who.int/reproductivehealth/publications/maternal_perinatal_health/978924504843/en/
a Including promotion of the following: care-seeking behaviour and ANC utilization; birth preparedness and complication readiness; sleeping under insecticide-treated bednets; skilled care for childbirth; companionship in labour and childbirth; nutritional advice; nutritional supplements; HIV testing during pregnancy;
exclusive breastfeeding; postnatal care and family planning; immunization according to national guidelines.
WHO recommendations on antenatal care for a positive pregnancy experience
E.6: Recruitment and retention of staff in rural and remote areas
RECOMMENDATION E.6: Policy-makers should consider educational, regulatory, financial, and personal and professional support interventions to recruit and retain qualified health workers in rural and remote areas. (Context-specific recommendation)
Remarks
• Recommendation E.6 has been adapted and integrated for the ANC guideline from the 2010 WHO publication Increasing access to health workers in remote and rural areas through improved retention: global policy recommendations (202).
• Strong recommendations (abridged) on recruitment and staff retention from the above guideline include the following.
– Use targeted admission policies to enrol students with a rural background in education programmes for various health disciplines and/or establish a health-care professional school outside of major cities.
– Revise undergraduate and postgraduate curricula to include rural health topics and clinical rotations in rural areas so as to enhance the competencies of health-care professionals working in rural areas.
– Improve living conditions for health workers and their families and invest in infrastructure and services (sanitation, electricity, telecommunications, schools, etc.).
– Provide a good and safe working environment, including appropriate equipment and supplies, supportive supervision and mentoring.
– Identify and implement appropriate outreach activities to facilitate cooperation between health workers from better-served areas and those in underserved areas, and, where feasible, use tele-health to provide additional support.
– Develop and support career development programmes and provide senior posts in rural areas so that health workers can move up the career path as a result of experience, education and training, without necessarily leaving rural areas.
– Support the development of professional networks, rural health-care professional associations, rural health journals, etc., to improve the morale and status of rural providers and reduce feelings of professional isolation.
– Adopt public recognition measures such as rural health days, awards and titles at local, national and international levels to lift the profile of working in rural areas.
• Conditional educational, regulatory and financial recommendations from this guideline can be found in the WHO global policy recommendations document (202), available at: http://www.who.int/hrh/
retention/guidelines/en/
E.7: Antenatal care contact schedules
RECOMMENDATION E.7: Antenatal care models with a minimum of eight contacts are recommended to reduce perinatal mortality and improve women’s experience of care.
(Recommended)
Remarks
• The GDG stresses that the four-visit focused ANC (FANC) model does not offer women adequate contact with health-care practitioners and is no longer recommended. With the FANC model, the first ANC visit occurs before 12 weeks of pregnancy, the second around 26 weeks, the third around 32 weeks, and the fourth between 36 and 38 weeks of gestation. Thereafter, women are advised to return to ANC at 41 weeks of gestation or sooner if they experience danger signs. Each ANC visit involves specific goals aimed at improving triage and timely referral of high-risk women and includes educational components (12). However, up-to-date evidence shows that the FANC model, which was developed in the 1990s, is probably associated with more perinatal deaths than models that comprise at least eight ANC visits.
Furthermore, evidence suggests that more ANC visits, irrespective of the resource setting, is probably associated with greater maternal satisfaction than less ANC visits.
• The GDG prefers the word “contact” to “visit”, as it implies an active connection between a pregnant woman and a health-care provider that is not implicit with the word “visit”. In terms of the operationalization of this recommendation, “contact” can be adapted to local contexts through community outreach programmes and lay health worker involvement.
• The decision regarding the number of contacts with a health system was also influenced by the following:
– evidence supporting improving safety during pregnancy through increased frequency of maternal and fetal assessment to detect problems;
– evidence supporting improving health system communication and support around pregnancy for women and families;
– evidence from HIC studies indicating no important differences in maternal and perinatal health outcomes between ANC models that included at least eight contacts and ANC models that included more (11–15) contacts (203);
– evidence indicating that more contact between pregnant women and knowledgeable, supportive and respectful health-care practitioners is more likely to lead to a positive pregnancy experience.
• Implementation considerations related to this recommendation and the mapping of guideline
recommendations to ANC contacts are presented in Chapter 4: Implementation of the ANC guideline and recommendations.