More articles from EDITORIAL
- A Tablet-Based Tool for Care During Labor+Attention to System Requirements
Evidence on using a tablet-based labor decision-support tool suggests the potential for improved practices in labor management. Further rigorous study on these tools is needed to assess the improvements in labor care and outcomes as well as the system requirements needed to achieve such improvements.
- It Takes a System: Magnesium Sulfate for Prevention of Eclampsia in a Resource-Limited Community Setting
Magnesium sulfate is not a silver bullet to reduce maternal mortality associated with preeclampsia/eclampsia. We believe a well-functioning health care system, especially at the hospital level, with competent well-trained providers, adequate equipment, and medications will likely be necessary.
- Healthy Timing and Spacing of Pregnancy: Reducing Mortality Among Women and Their Children
Accessible, affordable, and high-quality postabortion care (PAC) can prevent maternal death and disability and provides an important opportunity to prevent future unintended pregnancies. This supplement offers learnings on PAC provision from the community of partners around the world, including service delivery and community engagement models, approaches to support facility-based providers, best practices in pre- and post-procedure counseling, and approaches to institutionalize PAC in public- and private-sector health systems.
- Postabortion Care and the Voluntary Family Planning Component: Expanding Contraceptive Choices and Service Options
Universal access to voluntary postabortion family planning is a critical and compelling component of postabortion care. Such access should be joined with postpartum family planning services in national programs, health information systems, and training programs. The same providers and facilities deliver both services, and integration could yield cost efficiencies and increased coverage for women receiving postabortion care.
- Human-Centered Design and Sustainable Malaria Interventions
Human-centered design provides a method to adapt malaria control interventions to be more closely aligned with a family's convenience, comfort, and personal lifestyle, enabling a broader and more sustained culture of access and use.
- Retaining Patients in Care: An Important but Neglected Challenge
A hospital-based follow-up program in Uganda helped improve retention of patients in care across a range of health problems. Although the specific approach may not be replicable in other settings, hospitals in Uganda and beyond should consider how they can improve retention of patients requiring long-term care, including for HIV, TB, malnutrition, and noncommunicable diseases.
- Scale and Ambition in the Engagement of Private Providers for Tuberculosis Care and Prevention
The tuberculosis (TB) community knows the importance of engaging private providers to reach critical TB targets, and knows how to engage successfully. The next challenge is to transition such efforts to government stewardship and financing in order to reach scale.
- Saving Mothers, Giving Life: A Systems Approach to Reducing Maternal and Perinatal Deaths in Uganda and Zambia
The 5-year public-private partnership boldly addressed maternal mortality in Uganda and Zambia using a systems approach at the district level to avoid delays in women seeking, reaching, and receiving timely, quality services. This supplement provides details on the Saving Mothers, Giving Life partnership and approach, including the model, impact, costs, and sustainability.
- Time to Evolve Beyond Prototypical Community-Based Distribution (CBD) of Contraception?
CBD efforts have a definite role in a variety of country programming contexts. However, contemporary efforts need to strive for an expanded method mix, strong support and motivation of CBD agents, and robust integration with existing health systems.
- Antenatal Corticosteroids: Primum non nocere
Efforts continue—building on work of the UN Commission on Life-Saving Commodities for Women and Children—to expand use of antenatal corticosteroids in low-resource settings. We argue that until more is known on the balance of benefit versus harm, such promotion should be suspended.