Service readiness and availability of perinatal care in public hospitals - a multi-centric baseline study in Nepal

Abstract

Background Poor quality of maternal and newborn care contributes to nearly two million deaths of mothers and their newborns worldwide annually. Assessment of readiness and availability of perinatal care services in health facilities provides evidence to underlying bottlenecks for improving quality of care. This study aimed to evaluate the readiness and availability of perinatal care services in public hospitals of Nepal using WHO’s health system framework. Methods This was a mixed methods study conducted in 12 public hospitals in Nepal. A cross-sectional study design was used to assess the readiness and availability of perinatal care services. Three different data collection tools were developed. The tools were pretested in a tertiary maternity hospital and the discrepancies in the tools were corrected before administering in the study hospitals. The data were collected between July 2017 to July 2018. Results Only five out of 12 hospitals had the availability of all the basic newborn care services under assessment. Kangaroo mother care (KMC) service was lacking in most of the hospitals (7 out of 12). Only two hospitals had all health workers involved in perinatal care services trained in neonatal resuscitation. All of the hospitals were found not to have all the required equipment for newborn care services. Overall, only 60% of the health workers had received neonatal resuscitation training. A small proportion (3.2%) of the newborn infants with APGAR < 7 at one minute received bag and mask ventilation. Only 8.2% of the mothers initiated breastfeeding to newborn infants before transfer to the post-natal ward, 73.4% of the mothers received counseling on breastfeeding, and 40.8% of the mothers kept their newborns in skin-to-skin contact immediately after birth. Conclusion The assessment reflected the gaps in the availability of neonatal care services, neonatal resuscitation training, availability of equipment, infrastructure, information system, and governance. Rapid scale-up of neonatal resuscitation training and increased availability of equipment is needed for improving the quality of neonatal care services.

Service availability and readiness for basic emergency obstetric and newborn care: Analysis from Nepal Health Facility Survey 2021

“…Compared to results from NHFS 2015 [ 26 ], the availability of all other signal functions except parenteral oxytocin has decreased at national level which also resembles the findings presented in the annual report of DoHS [ 15 ]. One of the multicentric studies in 2022 has also revealed a considerable gap in neonatal care services which aligns with our study [ 27 ]. The met need of EOC has been continuously declining in the last four fiscal years.…”

An assessment of immediate newborn care readiness and availability in Nepal

“…The finding is consistent with an observational study of four referral level public hospitals in Nepal which found that skin-to-skin contact was practiced in only 3.50% of babies who breathed spontaneously after birth [ 22 ]. The lack of trained and motivated healthcare staff, along with logistical challenges affects its availability [ 23 ].…”

Primary health facility readiness to care for infants under six months at risk of poor growth and development: A HHFA-based survey

“…First, we purposively selected three districts among the 77 in Senegal- where collaborators had existing partnerships: two rural (Dahra, Kaffrine) and one urban (Pikine) district. The sample size was determined by resources available for the study, as has been described in earlier service readiness studies with sample sizes of between 12 and 30 health facilities [31],[32]. We selected fifteen PHC facilities, five from each district using random number allocation from the sample frame list from the chief medical officer (18 facilities in Dahra, 24 in Kaffrine and 12 in Pikine).…”