Impact and Operational Assessment of an Integrated Safe Motherhood and Newborn Health Promotion Package: a Community-based Cluster Randomized Controlled Trial

Burden: Globally around 6.3 million children under five years of age died in 2013, two third of which occur in the low & middle income countries. Bangladesh is one of the LMICs countries with high burden of maternal and neonatal mortalities. In Bangladesh, there has been a considerable progress in reduction of both child and maternal mortality in recent decades. From 1994 to 2014 under-5 mortality rate has reduced from 133 to 46 per 1000 live births in Bangladesh; however, within the same timeframe neonatal mortality declined from 52 to 28 per 1000 live births. This slow decrease in newborn deaths means that it now constitutes a greater share of total under-5 deaths. At present, neonatal mortality accounts for 74% of deaths in infants and 61% in children aged less than 5 years. Similarly, the country was able to decline MMR by 70% between 1990 and 2013, from 574 to 170 per 100,000 live births, with an annual reduction rate of 5.0%. Such statistics highlights the importance of focusing on perinatal and early postnatal periods to prevent maternal and neonatal mortalities.

Knowledge gap: Safe motherhood promotion project (SMPP) was a five (5 yr) year pilot project, launched in July 2006, by the Government of Bangladesh (GOB) in collaboration with JICA. The aim of the project was to improve the health status of pregnant and postpartum women and neonates. SMPP implemented three linked activities i.e., advocacy at the central level, strengthening of health facilities and empowerment of community. Evaluation of SMPP found positive changes in UN process indicators on EmOC including met needs (up from 31% to 55%), case fatality rate (<0.1%) and skilled birth attendance rate (from 18% to 25%). The major weakness of the previous assessment of SMPP were use of a before-after design without any concurrent comparison area and the assessment lacked population based mortality estimates, only measured hospital case fatality rate. Hence, there is lack of strong evidences regarding the impact of the project.

Relevance: The proposed project is expected to provide essential evidences to the GOB and other development partners with the help of stronger design and valid evaluation processes. It would help not only in prioritizing, planning, and further scaling-up of SMPNS interventions in other areas of Bangladesh but in informing other developing countries in similar settings also.

Hypothesis: Safe Motherhood and Newborn Survival intervention package will reduce neonatal mortality by 25%, in comparison to the routine services in Chandpur district, Bangladesh

Methods: A community-based, cluster-randomized design will be used to evaluate the effectiveness of an integrated "Safe Motherhood and Newborn Health Promotion Package" in Chandpur district, Bangladesh. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches will be employed to address the primary and secondary objectives. Baseline, midterm and end of intervention household survey will be conducted using validated structured questionnaire to assess the coverage of maternal & newborn health interventions. Health facility assessments surveys will be conducted periodically to assess facility readiness and utilization of maternal and neonatal health services in the participating health facilities. Additionally, relevant data from routine Health Management Information System (HMIS) will be regularly collected and extracted An ongoing investigating system will be in place at the health facilities to identify and document maternal near miss cases.