BACKGROUND Women's group intervention is a community based initiative through which rural women form groups, meet regularly to discuss maternal health issues affecting them, and come up with locally available solutions. This intervention has been associated with reduced maternal and neonatal mortality in limited resource settings. Nevertheless, the mechanisms through which women's groups influe...

Health financing strategies that incorporate financial incentives are being applied in many low- and middle-income countries, and improving maternal and neonatal health is often a central goal. As yet, there have been few reviews of such programmes and their impact on maternal health. The US Government Evidence Summit on Enhancing Provision and use of Maternal Health Services through Financial ...

objective: the aim of this study was to estimate the frequency of preterm birth (ptb) and premature rapture of membranes (prom) and their associations with maternal factors. material and methods: this cross sectional study was carried out at akbar-abadi hospital in tehran during january 2009-aprile 2010. four hundred sixty six primiparous women with gestational age more than 20 weeks and single...

BACKGROUND Rwanda has achieved great improvements in several key health indicators, including maternal mortality and other health outcomes. This raises the question: what has made this possible, and what makes Rwanda so unique? METHODS We describe the results of a web-based survey among district health managers in Rwanda who gave their personal opinions on the factors that drive performance i...

background and purpose: birth outcomes and fertility measures are commonly evaluated in maternal and child health integrated program (mchip) in the field of public health. given the key role of time- trend study in the projection of current data to the future, this population-based study aimed to describe the significant changes of birth outcomes and fertility measures in the rural population o...

BACKGROUND Utilization of maternal health services is associated with improved maternal and neonatal health outcomes. Considering global and national interests in the Millennium Development Goal and Nigeria's high level of maternal mortality, understanding the factors affecting maternal health use is crucial. Studies on the use of maternal care services have largely overlooked community and oth...

Background and Aim: Preeclampsia is a considerable problem of pregnancy. Endothelial dysfunction and placental hypoxia are the current hypothesis of preeclampsia. Chronic inflammation, including periodontitis may provoke systemic maternal and placental pro-inflammatory endothelial dysfunction, which represent a significant risk factor for diseases of vascular origin. So this study was carried o...

Breastfeeding is widely recognized for its unparalleled contribution to improving child and maternal health outcomes. Recent research estimates that suboptimal breastfeeding is responsible for 11.6 percent of deaths of children under 5 years of age, the greatest share of preventable child deaths attributable to a single cause.1 Coordinated efforts to improve rates of exclusive breastfeeding dur...

BACKGROUND Public health interventions are increasingly evaluated using cluster-randomised trials in which groups rather than individuals are allocated randomly to treatment and control arms. Outcomes for individuals within the same cluster are often more correlated than outcomes for individuals in different clusters. This needs to be taken into account in sample size estimations for planned tr...

To assess the impact of Medicaid expansion for pregnant women in South Carolina and California, the authors compared change in rates of timely prenatal care, adverse infant and maternal health outcomes, and use of cesarean section for groups of pregnant women who were either uninsured or covered by Medicaid, versus women with private coverage. The results showed small and/or inconsistent change...