Making childbirth safer in Indonesia

Indonesian Community Health Center providing maternal and neonatal care (image predates pandemic) Photo: Masyitah Saifuddin Study led by Göttingen and Syiah Kuala Universities finds Safe Childbirth Checklist contributes to improved maternal and neonatal healthcare Every year, 295,000 maternal deaths, 2 million stillbirths, and 2.5 million neonatal deaths occur worldwide. Improved quality of care could prevent the majority of those deaths. For this reason, the World Health Organization (WHO) introduced a Safe Childbirth Checklist (SCC), targeting ways to improve the quality of care. An international research team from Göttingen University, Syiah Kuala University, Indonesia, and Heidelberg University adapted the intervention to meet local needs, collected data and analysed the Checklist's effects on quality of care and mortality in 32 health facilities in Indonesia. Their results were published in JAMA Network Open. The researchers found that using the Safe Childbirth Checklist (SCC) increased the communication of danger signs, improved the way that babies were fed, and increased the number of times temperature was measured in neonates. In particular, midwives carried out adequate measurement of temperature in less than half of the births in health facilities without the Checklist.