Birth Kits - Review of Progress to Date

This presentation by Dr. Joy Lawn discusses progress and strategies for next steps relating to distribution and use of clean birth kits (CBKs) globally. Around 1 million deaths a year may be due to unclean births. Clean safe birth is a basic right for all mothers & newborns, alongside access to emergency obstetric & newborn care. While the effectivenes of clean birth kits is difficult to measure, it’s approximated that if 90% of all home births (60 million per year) used a clean birth kit, then 108,300 lives would be saved at $215 to $921 per life. Moving forward the questions to answer are:

• Do CBKs act as a disincentive for facility birth? Or can they be an incentive? Is this predictable in different contexts?

• Are CBKs more effective with certain cointerventions? How to implement most effectively?

• Are there add-on commodities to consider adding based on level of evidence, expected effect, cost and feasibility?

Clean birth kits are appropriate in emergency & humanitarian settings, and where there is low current coverage of facility births (assuming they do not act as a disincentive for facility birth).