A Review on Interventions to Improve the Maternal Care during Pregnancy and Childbirth in Rural India

Abstract

Most of the maternal deaths occur in developing countries and India contributes to one-fifth of this maternal mortality. Many of these deaths are preventable through effective interventions. The present study aims to address the gap in the effect of improved quality of care in pregnancy and childbirth through a review of existing literature. Its focus on displaying the evidence of interventions on care during pregnancy and childbirth in rural India and to compile the existing evidence of the effectiveness of these interventions which may be helpful for policy making. The search strategy was to identify relevant articles in the database like MEDLINE, PubMed, Popline, and Cochrane. A total of 264 abstracts from 2005 to 2018 were identified from the database search. After reviewing the abstracts against inclusion and quality assessment, 16 articles were found suitable for review. The review shows that community-level interventions focusing on women, frontline health workers and family members through knowledge enhancement, use of mobile technology and upgrading health facilities resulted in improvement in the utilization of maternal practices. This review found evidence that community health workers were effective in delivering health promotion or education or preventive intervention for maternal services in rural India.