Monitoring Emergency Obstetric Care: A Handbook

Monitoring Emergency Obstetric Care: A Handbook

* Publisher: World Health Organization, UNFPA, UNICEF and AMDD
* Number Of Pages: 164
* Publication Date: 2009-04-24
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 9241547731
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9789241547734

This handbook is an update of an earlier publication on monitoring the availability and use of obstetric services, issued by UNICEF, WHO and UNFPA in 1997. The indicators defined within the publication have been used by ministries of health, international agencies and programme managers in over 50 countries around the world. This revision incorporates changes based on monitoring and assessment conducted worldwide and the emerging evidence on the topic over the years, and has been agreed by an international panel of experts. It includes two new indicators and an additional signal function, with updated evidence and new resources.

This handbook aims to describe the indicators and to give guidance on conducting studies to people working in the field. It includes a list of life-saving services, or signal functions , that define a health facility with regard to its capacity to treat obstetric emergencies. The emphasis is on actual rather than theoretical functioning. The emergency obstetric care indicators described in this handbook can be used to measure progress in a programmatic continuum: from the availability of and access to emergency obstetric care to the use and quality of those services.

The Emergency Obstetric Care Handbook is the revised version of the former "Guidelines for assessing the availability, use and quality of obstetric services published jointly in 1997 by UNICEF, UNFPA, WHO and AMDD (the Averting Maternal Death and Disability programme of Columbia University).