View clinical trials related to Maternal Health.
Filter by:Some of the challenges Pakistan faces in priority areas of national relevance include absence of social policy to improve innovative governance and reform of the primary healthcare system, especially for maternal and child health. One integral tool for development of social policy in a country is the integration of the social work profession at primary level. Developed countries have progressed by strengthening the primary workforce with social workers, who have contributed by developing a social policy protection floor for mother and child in primary level communities through: (i) assessment of community needs (e.g. for housing, health, education, and employment), (ii) robust data collection, (iii) political advocacy, and (iv) supporting literacy and counseling . In this way, there is potential to fill a gap by adding Social Workers to the primary health force team in Pakistan to investigate the following research questions: 1. Can a robust, objective, third-party Community Needs Assessment Report (by Social Workers) help to mobilize governments and policy-makers for improve planning and protective policies for disadvantaged communities? 2. Can a more comprehensive health electronic database be developed with both health and social variables to better plan policy development and develop a much-needed regional Index for Maternal Health and Wellbeing? 3. Can maternal and health outcomes be impacted positively by the following intervention this project plans to deliver: (i) Reproductive and Child Health; (ii) Hygiene and Sanitation & Nutrition and Immunity Building; (iii) Health-Risk Behavior Modification; and (iv) Psychosocial Needs Assessment and Mental Health Awareness? 4. Can primary healthcare services become more efficient and effective (in teamwork and improved care plans for client) through interprofessional health workforce collaboration and supplementation of social workers to the team? The proposed project, lasting 24 months, will aid socio-economic development of the country by improving primary healthcare services, improving maternal and child health outcomes, improving preventive behavior overall in families, and strengthening the health workforce team. Improving preventive health also reduces national health costs in the long-run at an estimated USD 45 billion. Building an electronic database with both health and social indicators is integral for the planning of a more effective social and health policy in the future. Integrating social workers at primary level will create thousands of jobs per year for Pakistan and help develop the educations sector as well and provide opportunities for more health workforce development, like public health officers. The activities that will be undertaken to achieve the project goals include: 1. Development of a digital app and finalization of an Index for Maternal Health and Wellbeing 2. Preparation of a Community Assessment Needs Report for mobilization of social protection floor 3. A Pre-Post Test Survey to measure changes caused by intervention for: (i) Basic Clinical Health Indicators, (ii) Reproductive and Child Health, (iii) Hygiene and Sanitation & Nutrition and Immunity Building, (iv) Health-Risk Behavior Modification; and (v) Psychosocial Assessment and Therapy needs. 4. Dissemination of findings to government bodies, policy-makers, scholars, and researchers to mobilize social policy support and improved governance at primary level through the project pilot model. An interdisciplinary team of social policy analyst, economist, physician, comprise the main investigators who have developed the proposal and will oversee the study. They will be supported by a clinical psychologist, biostatistician, and a social statistician for assistance in technical psychosocial assessment and advance data analysis for Pre-Post Test design. Officers from Forman Christian College University will support the project in areas of senior consultancy, IT support and digital app development, and budgeting and audit. Senior consultancy and support for recruitment and training for social workers as data collectors and intervention facilitators will be provided by the University of the Punjab. The sectoral collaborators and technical consultations, including gaining necessary permissions for data collection in primary settings, will be provided by The Primary & Secondary Healthcare Department, Punjab, Office of the Director General Health Services, Policy & strategic Planning unit (PSPU), development partners (UNICEF, WHO, BMGF), Academia (KEMU) and planning & development department Punjab.
The overarching goal of the ARCH Survey is to establish a prospective longitudinal pregnancy surveillance study in Lusaka, Zambia, to precisely characterize the pregnancy rate and outcomes of women of reproductive age prior to, during, and following pregnancy and to investigate the structural, sociodemographic, and clinical covariates that contribute to adverse outcomes in each reproductive epoch.
The IMiC Consortium will analyze milk from 1000 mother-infant dyads across 4 diverse settings (Tanzania, Pakistan, Burkina Faso and Canada). Samples will be stored centrally at the Manitoba Interdisciplinary Lactation Centre (MILC) biorepository and distributed to multiple laboratories for analysis of macronutrients, micronutrients, oligosaccharides, growth factors, immunoglobulins, cytokines, metabolites and microbes. Data will be harmonized and stored in a central database, and diverse statistical methods will be applied for data integration and analysis.
In this proposed study, the investigators hope to assess the quality of recovery after delivery in a local population that would take into account physiological and psychological parameters to better understand the recovery process after delivery. The investigators will identify risk factors, especially those that are modifiable and associated with a poorer ObsQoR score and hence a poor quality of recovery after delivery. This data may then be used to educate women and manage expectations in the postpartum period, and help develop potential therapeutic interventions.
Helping Babies Breathe (HBB) implementation is associated with reduction in neonatal deaths and reduction in fresh stillbirths. HBB has successfully integrated some aspects of simulation into an educational curriculum that teach the management of neonatal emergencies in resource-constrained countries. Simulation based training brings special advantages and may enhance HBB training. Critical elements of simulation such as enhanced realism and post-event debriefing may carry potential to strengthen HBB training to attain maximum impact. However, evidence for the effectiveness of this combined approach is limited.
Early life exposures may lead to adverse effects on health in later life. The Boston birth Cohort study is designed to study a broad array of early life factors and their effects on maternal and child health outcomes.
1. Burden: In global perspective, it is estimated that the lives of 150,000 women could be saved each year worldwide with access to sufficient family planning services. It is indicated that only 26 percent women received four or more antenatal care (ANC) visits during their pregnancies, while 67.7 percent received at least one ANC during their pregnancies which are the great challenges for ensuring safe motherhood in the country. As a part of safe motherhood, it is estimated that only 28.8 percent deliveries are being conducted in health facilities in the country. In case of postnatal care (PNC), from 2008 to 2010, only 27 percent of women received PNC for their last deliveries from a medically-trained provider within two days of their delivery. Despite the tremendous success of expanded programme on immunization (EPI) in Bangladesh, a substantial number of children are not fully vaccinated under EPI as data shows 82 percent were fully vaccinated by the age of 12 months. 2. Knowledge gap: Use of technology for covering all or major components of primary health care (PHC) is yet to be developed and tested in Bangladesh. Further, no such initiative has yet been taken focusing community clinic (CC) to ensure equity of services in Bangladesh. 3. Relevance: At present in Bangladesh, the CCs cater the services on family planning, maternal neonatal and child health (MNCH), health education for the rural people by using e-health strategy as the community health care provider (CHCP), newly recruited staff of community clinic are equipped with internet connected laptop service. So, updated technology for updating information, follow up and referral in primary health care can be used to increase the utilization of health services. Hypothesis (if any): Use of smart phones by community level healthcare providers will increase utilization of reproductive health (RH) and family planning (FP), MNCH, integrated management of childhood illness (IMCI), EPI and other PHC services at rural communities in Bangladesh. Objectives: To develop and test a mechanism as well as assess the impact of mHealth strategy to improve RH and FP, MNCH, IMCI, EPI and other PHC services in rural communities of Bangladesh. Methods: The service delivery personnel who are providing the services to the community people at different levels (community clinic, union health and family welfare centre, upazila health complex) will be equipped with smart phones having the facilities for text messages, voice messages as well as internet and data capturing. Training on handling of the smart phones, data capturing and monitoring will be provided to service providers in each upazila. They will be trained to input, edit, verify and monitor the data on different services through the software installed in their smart phones. The community clinic management and support groups will be oriented and motivated on mobile phone based registration, notification and referral to the health facilities. Outcome measures/variables: This will be a quasi-experimental pre-post design study and evaluation will be done through comparing antenatal care (ANC), postnatal care (PNC), and contraceptive prevalence rate (CPR) and EPI coverage before and after its implementation in the study versus comparison areas. The study will be conducted over a period of 30 months.