Quality of care in India

Every year 303,000 mothers and 2.7 million newborn infants die annually around the time of childbirth and that many more are affected by preventable illness. 2.6 million babies are stillborn each year. The Sustainable Development Goals have set ambitious health-related targets for mothers, newborns, children under the umbrella of Universal Health Coverage by 2030. Addressing quality of care will be fundamental in reducing maternal and newborn mortality and achieving the health-related SDG targets.

The World Health Organization has identified quality of care for women and children as a priority in addressing preventable maternal and child mortality and states a vision that ‘Every woman, child and adolescent should receive quality care throughout the continuum of their life course and care’. Quality of care is also a key component of the right to health, and the route to equity and dignity for women and children. In order to achieve universal health coverage, it is essential to deliver health services that meet quality criteria.

In this regard, improving the quality of maternal health services has become an urgent need in India. Over the last decade, India has made significant progress in achieving reductions in maternal and newborn mortality and morbidity. Increasing the investments in improving access to and promoting institutional births in the country has helped country achieve its current MMR of 130 per 1 lakh live births (SRS 2016). However, the rate of decrease in maternal mortality in the country has not kept pace with the improvements in the institutional births. It is also important to understand that for mothers and new-borns, the period around childbirth is the most critical for saving the maximum number of lives and preventing stillbirths and improving the quality of services will have the maximum impact on achieve the desired reductions in the country to meet SDG targets.

To further accelerate reductions in maternal and newborn mortality and morbidity, improving the quality of care and patient safety will thus be critical in the country. This can be ensured by making provisions for equitable access to high quality, respectful, people centred care for labouring mothers and newborn so that that many morbidities, disabilities and deaths of mothers and infants could be prevented. This will be in line with the “Quality of Care framework” for maternal and newborn health developed by the WHO which encompasses both the provision and experience of care.

KEY FACTS

In one to three sentences, outline key facts about this activity.

• Building, strengthening and sustaining national leadership for quality of care – The underlying vision of ensuring quality of care is to ensure “Every mother and newborn receives quality care throughout the pregnancy, childbirth and postnatal periods”
• Accelerate and sustain implementation of quality-of-care improvement packages for mothers, newborns and children
• Facilitate learning, knowledge sharing and generation of evidence on quality planning, improvement and control
• Develop, strengthen and sustain institutions and methods for accountability for quality of care.