BACKGROUND Antenatal, delivery and postnatal care services are amongst the recommended interventions aimed at preventing maternal and newborn deaths worldwide. West Java is one of the provinces of Java Island in Indonesia with a high proportion of home deliveries, a low attendance of four antenatal services and a low postnatal care uptake. This paper aims to explore community members' perspecti...

BACKGROUND Following childbirth, women need to stay sufficiently long in health facilities to receive adequate care. Little is known about length of stay following childbirth in low- and middle-income countries or its determinants. METHODS AND FINDINGS We described length of stay after facility delivery in 92 countries. We then created a conceptual framework of the main drivers of length of s...

OBJECTIVE To assess the effect of the timing of first postnatal home visit by community health workers on neonatal mortality. DESIGN Analysis of prospectively collected data using time varying discrete hazard models to estimate hazard ratios for neonatal mortality according to day of first postnatal home visit. DATA SOURCE Data from a community based trial of neonatal care interventions con...

OBJECTIVE there is growing evidence that many parents with intellectual disabilities can parent successfully when given adequate support. This paper aims to explore the postnatal care experiences of mothers with an intellectual disability. DESIGN a qualitative design was used and data were collected using a semi-structured interview format and analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological An...

BACKGROUND The United Nations' Millennium Development Goals call for improving maternal and child health status. Their progress, however, has been minimal and uneven across countries. The continuum of care is a key to strengthening maternal, newborn, and child health. In this context, the Japanese government launched the Ghana Ensure Mothers and Babies Regular Access to Care (EMBRACE) Implement...

OBJECTIVES To investigate mothers' perspectives on the quality of postpartum care services in central Shanghai, China. DESIGN Semi-structured interviews. SETTING Two maternal and child health posts in two subdistricts in LW District, Central Shanghai, China. STUDY PARTICIPANTS Fifty postpartum mothers who attended the maternal and child health posts in the two subdistricts in LW District,...

BACKGROUND Continuity of care by a primary midwife during the antenatal, intrapartum and postpartum periods has been recommended in Australia and many hospitals have introduced a caseload midwifery model of care. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the effect of caseload midwifery on women's satisfaction with care across the maternity continuum. METHODS Pregnant women at low risk of complica...

BACKGROUND In Tanzania, more than 90% of all pregnant women attend antenatal care at least once and approximately 62% four times or more, yet less than five in ten receive skilled delivery care at available health units. We conducted a qualitative study in Ngorongoro district, Northern Tanzania, in order to gain an understanding of the health systems and socio-cultural factors underlying this d...

BACKGROUND Postnatal depression can have a substantial impact on the woman, the child and family as a whole. Thus, there is a need to examine different ways of helping women experiencing postnatal depression; encouraging them to exercise may be one way. A meta analysis found some support for exercise as an adjunctive treatment for postnatal depression but the methodological inadequacy of the fe...

BACKGROUND Progress towards MDG4 in South Africa will depend largely on scaling up effective prevention against mother to child transmission (PMTCT) of HIV and also addressing neonatal mortality. This imperative drives increasing focus on the neonatal period and particularly on the development and testing of appropriate models of sustainable, community-based care in South Africa in order to rea...