View clinical trials related to Antenatal Care.
Filter by:Antenatal care (ANC) has the potential to play a pivotal role in ensuring positive pregnancy outcomes for both mothers and their newborns. A critical component of all ANC is teaching women to recognize the major complications that account for the majority of preventable maternal and newborn deaths. Antenatal care provides an opportunity to promote a healthy lifestyle, to integrate positive health behaviors, and to develop a trusting relationship with a provider and the health system. While group ANC has been delivered and studied in high-resource settings for over a decade, it has only recently been introduced as an alternative to individual care in sub-Saharan Africa. The goal of this research is to improve health literacy and reduce preventable maternal and newborn morbidities and mortality within highly vulnerable, low and non-literate populations that assume a disproportionate burden of poor pregnancy outcomes globally. This research examines a bold, new approach to ANC that takes provision of care out of clinic exam rooms into small groups of women grouped by gestational age in low resource settings with low and non-literate populations. Group ANC has the potential to shift the current clinical practice paradigm of antenatal care for highly vulnerable women to improve maternal and newborn outcomes both globally and domestically. The investigators hypothesize that pregnant women randomized into group ANC will exhibit increased health literacy through: 1) increased birth preparedness and complication readiness (BPCR), including recognition of danger signs and knowledge of how to respond to such signs; 2) higher rates of care-seeking behaviors, including seeking care for problems identified during pregnancy, higher facility delivery rates, and increased attendance at postnatal and postpartum care; and 3) better clinical outcomes for themselves and their newborns than women who received the routine, individual ANC.
Somali-born women comprise one of the largest groups of immigrant women of childbearing age in Sweden, with increased risks for perinatal morbidity and mortality and poor experiences of care. Midwives in antenatal care have expressed a need for development of care tailored for this group of women. The overall aim is to develop and test the acceptability and immediate impacts of group antenatal care for Somali women residing in Sweden, in an effort to improve their experiences of antenatal care, their knowledge about childbearing and the Swedish health care system, their emotional wellbeing and ultimately, their pregnancy outcomes. The study includes four steps: Step I is the preparation phase including needs assessment. Step II is the intervention development and evaluation tool development phase. Step III is the intervention phase, which includes the implementation and evaluation of the intervention using historical controls. Step IV is the process evaluation and "lessons learned". Historical controls (n=80) have received standard individual care according to the national Swedish program for antenatal care, i.e. 8-9 appointments with a midwife during a normal pregnancy. Women in the intervention group (n=80) receive Group Antenatal Care provided in group sessions in a dialogue sensitive to language and cultural issues. The sessions are led by a midwife, assisted by a trained female Somali interpreter. 15 minutes for individual checkups in privacy are provided at end of the session. Primary outcomes: Women's overall ratings of antenatal care and views about specific aspects of care are captured by core questions in the Migrant Friendly Maternity Care Questionnaire (MFMCQ); and emotional wellbeing by the Edinburgh Postnatal Depression Scale (EPDS). Data are collected at recruitment, in gestational week 36 and at 2 months postpartum by means of face-to face interviews or interviews by telephone by a trained bilingual research assistant.
This protocol concerns the implementation and evaluation of an intervention designed to realign the existing cadre of Community Health Workers (CHW) in Neno District, Malawi to better support the care needs of the clients they serve. The proposed intervention is a 'Household Model' where CHWs will be assigned to households, rather than HIV or TB specific patients, and will be trained to provide support for a wider range of conditions including HIV, hypertension, diabetes, and pediatric malnutrition. The new model is designed to improve retention in care for clients with chronic, non-communicable diseases, along with increased uptake of women's health services and treatment for pediatric malnutrition, while sustaining the high retention rates for clients in the HIV program. Eleven sites (health centres and hospitals) were arranged into six clusters by estimated size of the catchment area populations, with a population range of 11,680 to 26,260 and an average population of 20,400. The order in which the intervention will be rolled out across the sites will be randomized so that the intervention can be evaluated in a stepped-wedge cluster randomized controlled trial. These clusters were grouped based mostly on geographic location but also on catchment area sizes, in order to maximize feasibility of training for the CHW team and not overload CHW training sessions with too many trainees.
Antenatal care is a key strategy for reducing maternal and neonatal morbidity and mortality rate because adequate utilization of antenatal health care services is associated with improved maternal and neonatal health outcomes. The trend of maternal mortality in developing countries has been increasing and various international organizations have reported that an important factor related to maternal and infant mortality has been linked to lack of antenatal care. According to Federal Ministry of Health, some of the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth can be avoided if the pregnant woman attends antenatal regularly. In order to decrease these mortality rates, regular antenatal care has to be instituted or reinforced which can only be achieved through identifying factors causing poor utilization of antenatal care services
A cluster randomized trial was conducted across eight rural sub-counties in southwestern Uganda. This study was conducted to determine the impact of advertising free obstetric ultrasound on the attendance to antenatal care clinics.