Measuring quality of care for all women and newborns: how do we know if we are doing it right? A review of facility assessment tools

Publication date: Available online 18 March 2019Source: The Lancet Global HealthAuthor(s): Vanessa Brizuela, Hannah H Leslie, Jigyasa Sharma, Ana Langer, Özge TunçalpSummaryBackgroundEnsuring quality of care during pregnancy and childbirth is crucial to improving health outcomes and reducing preventable mortality and morbidity among women and their newborns. In this pursuit, WHO developed a framework and standards, defining 31 quality statements and 352 quality measures to assess and improve quality of maternal and newborn care in health-care facilities. We aimed to assess the capacity of globally used, large-scale facility assessment tools to measure quality of maternal and newborn care as per the WHO framework.MethodsWe identified assessment tools through a purposive sample that met the following inclusion criteria: multicountry, facility-level, major focus on maternal and newborn health, data on input and process indicators, used between 2007 and 2017, and currently in use. We matched questions in the tools with 274 quality measures associated with inputs and processes within the WHO standards. We excluded quality measures relating to outcomes because these are not routinely measured by many assessment tools. We used descriptive statistics to calculate how many quality measures could be assessed using each of the tools under review. Each tool was assigned a 1 for fulfilling a quality measure based on the presence of any or all components as indicated in the standards.Fin...
Source: The Lancet Global Health - Category: International Medicine & Public Health Source Type: research