Research Article
Marience Kawenya, Adetoro A Adegoke
Correspondence Address :
Marience Kawenya
Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, Liverpool
L3 5QA, UK, Tel: +44 151 705 3710
Email:
mariencek@yahoo.co.uk
Received on: March 02, 2015, Accepted on: March 21, 2015, Published on: March 26, 2015
Citation: Kawenya M, Adegoke AA (2015). A multi-country assessment of providers of community based maternity care in resource limited countries
Copyright: 2015 Kawenya M, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Background: Resource poor countries continue to have large numbers of non-facility births and the highest numbers of pregnancy and child birth related mortality and morbidity in the world. For effective strategies to reduce maternal mortality, an understanding of current providers of community based maternity care for the poor is needed. This review explored providers of community maternal and newborn care in resource poor countries. The objectives were to identify community based maternity carers, their roles and functions, how they can complement the current global focus on skilled birth attendance, and to identify the enablers and barriers to their involvement in the continuum of care.
Methods: This was a systematic review. The following search terms and their appropriate variations and truncations were used: community based care, home birth, resource poor countries, maternal health, neonatal health, roles, enablers and challenges. An online database EBSCO Discover, which searched 37 databases was used.
Results: Fifty seven studies from three resource poor regions were included. There is a variety of Community based carers (CBCs) providing maternal and newborn care in resource poor countries, they differ by title, role, demographics, recruitment, skills, training, remuneration and employment status. These CBCs are mostly women of 18-90 years old, respected members living within their communities. Most CBCs are nominated by their communities, CBCs main role is to conduct deliveries. The main barriers to CBCs involvement in the continuum of care are poverty, poor skills, no equipment, challenging geographical terrain, mistrust from professionals and lack of supportive supervision. The main enablers are CBCs integration into health system, supportive supervision, and availability of supplies, training and access to functional referral systems.
Conclusion: The diverse cadres of CBCs in poor countries can, with enablers suited for each local context bridge the gap in the continuum of care between facilities and communities.
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