Community Health Workers Can Reduce Foetal Deaths in India: Researchers

Researchers have stressed that large forces of trained community health workers and standardised healthcare systems could reduce the number of maternal, newborn and foetal deaths in India.

A meta-analysis of three studies, published in the journal Lancet, examined the outcomes of 70,000 women in Mozambique, Pakistan and India between 2014-17.

The study from King's College London in the UK, aimed to reduce deaths associated with pre-eclampsia which is a condition that causes high blood pressure during pregnancy and after labour.

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Globally, pre-eclampsia is the second leading cause of maternal mortality, with 76,000 maternal deaths and 500,000 foetal and new-born deaths every year worldwide.

"We designed the three Community Level Interventions for Pre-eclampsia (CLIP) trials in Pakistan, India, and Mozambique to have the results pulled together into this analysis," said study researcher Peter von Dadelszen, Professor at King's College London.

According to the researchers, the CLIP trials divided women between control and intervention groups. Control groups continued with their local standard of care, whereas intervention groups had access to community health workers who could detect, treat, and refer to hospital women with hypertension, a symptom of pre-eclampsia.

Women were also taught how to recognise problems during pregnancy and health workers had access to an app that could help determine the risk to patients and blood pressure and blood oxygen devices so that they could assess women in their homes.

The analysis shows that when there were enough community health workers to provide care there were fewer deaths of mothers, fewer stillbirths and fewer deaths of newborns. However, when there were not enough community health workers, there was no impact.

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Researchers recommended expanding the community health worker workforce so individual women were in contact with care providers at least eight times in each pregnancy and to improve standards of healthcare systems.

"Previously, most efforts had focussed on hospital-based care and we moved the focus to the care of pregnant women in their communities, with that care being given by community health workers," the study authors wrote.

"Overall, a shortage of community health workers in these communities meant that we did not improve outcomes thr ough our intervention," they noted. (IANS)