The Adding Content to Contact Project: Case Studies for Implementing Antenatal and Postnatal Care in Low-Resource Settings

By: Annie Kearns, Project Manager, Maternal Health Task Force, Women and Health Initiative

For the past nine months, the Adding Content to Contact (ACC) project at the Women and Health Initiative has been working to systematically assess the obstacles that prevent and the factors that enable the adoption and implementation of cost-effective interventions for antenatal and postnatal care along the care continuum. The project is also examining how these interventions can best be adopted and scaled up in resource poor settings to benefit women and children. As part of that process, the ACC team has been researching care delivery around the world. Today, we have published eight case studies highlighting various methods of delivering antenatal and postnatal care in a variety of settings:

  1. Focused antenatal care in Tanzania—Delivering individualized, targeted, high-quality care
  2. Group care: Alternative models of care delivery to increase women’s access, engagement, and satisfaction
  3. Health Extension Workers in Ethiopia— Delivering community-based antenatal and postnatal care
  4. Jacaranda Health—A model for sustainable, affordable, high-quality maternal health care for Nairobi’s low-income women
  5. Lady Health Workers in Pakistan—Improving access to health care for rural women and families
  6. Postnatal care in Nepal—Components of care, implementation challenges, and success factors
  7. The Developing Families Center—Providing maternal and child care to low-income families in Washington, D.C.
  8. The Manoshi project—Bringing quality maternity care to poor women in urban Bangladesh

Members of the ACC project team will be attending the ICM Congress in Prague, Czech Republic next week. These case studies will be discussed in detail during our session on Thursday, 5 June, 8:30am – 12:00pm in Room 4.3. We hope to see many of you there!