Preconception Care in Low- and Middle-Income Countries: New Opportunities and a New Metric
نویسندگان
چکیده
Globally, lowand middle-income countries (LMICs) carry a disproportionately heavy burden of maternal and neonatal mortality and morbidity [1]. Too many women haemorrhage to death peripartum, develop acute stroke, renal failure, or pulmonary edema from uncontrolled hypertension, or are affected by severe sepsis, including after unsafe abortion [2]. And when bad things happen to a pregnant woman, the same is likely to be true for her fetus or newborn [3], which can include neonatal sepsis or preterm entry into a world that lacks the facilities to deal with a baby’s immature organ system [4]. Indeed, among adolescent mothers and women who deliver in rural or sprawling peri-urban areas, the flagrant persistence of inequitable health outcomes has beckoned experts to generate priorities for action [2], yet preconception care has somehow been neglected. Until now. Thanks to Sohni Dean and colleagues and reported in this week’s PLOS Medicine, preconception care has found a place in the continuum of care aimed at improving maternal, newborn, and child health in LMICs [5]. They have created and ranked an extensive list of maternal and obstetrical delivery risk factors, clarified which of those appear amenable to preconception care interventions, and packaged them according to expert-defined criteria like ‘‘answerability’’ and ‘‘effectiveness.’’ The work that went into this is extensive, and we recommend reading their paper more than once. Preconception Period— Delaying Conception in Young Women
منابع مشابه
Are We Asking All the Right Questions About Quality of Care in Low- and Middle-Income Countries?
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