Service readiness for inpatient care of small and sick newborns:Improving measurement in low- and middle-income settings

Abstract

Background: In 2018, 2.5 million newborns died; mainly from prematurity, infections, and intrapartum events. Preventing these deaths requires health systems to provide routine and emergency care at birth, and quality inpatient care for small and sick newborns. Despite high potential impact, inpatient newborn care is not consistently measured. Methods: For this PhD, I conducted a bottleneck analysis using data from 12 national workshops regarding delivery of inpatient newborn care in low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). Using WHO guidelines, grey literature and expert consultation, I mapped the components required to deliver inpatient care and reviewed these against three health facility assessment tools. Finally, I carried out an online survey to elicit global practitioner opinions regarding levels of newborn care, paralleling those used for monitoring emergency obstetric care in LMIC. Results: In 12 high-burden countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, health financing and workforce were identified as the greatest bottlenecks to scaling up quality inpatient care, followed by community ownership. My review identified 654 components required to deliver inpatient care. These are inconsistently measured by existing health facility assessments. The 262 survey respondents agreed on 12 interventions to comprise a package of care for small and sick newborns; selected levels of care varied by clinical background and experience in LMIC. Conclusion: Inpatient newborn care faces multiple health system challenges, particularly to ensure funding and skilled staffing. Standard facility numbers and staffing ratios by defined levels of care are important for countries to benchmark service delivery progress. Due to the large number of components required for delivering quality care, newborn “signal functions” could be selected by level of care to parallel emergency obstetric care indicators. Improved measurement of service readiness requires sustained focus on interoperability of routine measurement systems, and further research to better capture the experience of newborn inpatient care for families.