WHO recommendations on maternal and newborn care for a positive postnatal experience

Overview

This guideline aims to improve the quality of essential, routine postnatal care for women and newborns with the ultimate goal of improving maternal and newborn health and well-being. It recognizes a “positive postnatal experience” as a significant end point for all women giving birth and their newborns, laying the platform for improved short- and long-term health and well-being. A positive postnatal experience is defined as one in which women, newborns, partners, parents, caregivers and families receive information, reassurance and support in a consistent manner from motivated health workers; where a resourced and flexible health system recognizes the needs of women and babies, and respects their cultural context.

This is a consolidated guideline of new and existing recommendations on routine postnatal care for women and newborns receiving facility- or community-based postnatal care in any resource setting.

Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms and abbreviations
• Executive summary
• 1. Introduction
  • 1.1. Background
  • 1.2. Target audience
  • 1.3. Scope of the guideline
• 2. Methods
  • 2.1. Contributors to the guideline
  • 2.2. Identifying priority questions and outcomes
  • 2.3. Integration of recommendations from published WHO guidelines
  • 2.4. Focus and approach
  • 2.5. Evidence identification and retrieval
  • 2.6. Quality assessment and grading of the evidence
  • 2.7. Formulation of the recommendations
  • 2.8. Decision-making during the GDG meetings
  • 2.9. Declaration of interests by external contributors
  • 2.10. Document preparation and peer review
  • 2.11. Presentation of guideline content
• 3. Evidence and recommendations
  • A. Maternal care
  • B. Newborn care
  • C. Health systems and health promotion interventions
• 4. Implementation of the WHO postnatal care recommendations
• 5. Dissemination
• 6. Applicability issues
• 7. Monitoring and evaluating the impact of the guideline
• 8. Updating of the guideline
• 9. References
• Annex 1. Contributors to the guideline
• Annex 2. Summary of declarations of interests from the Guideline Development Group (GDG) members and how they were managed
• Annex 3. Template “summary of judgements” table for evidence-to-decision domains
• Web Annexes
  • Web Annex 1. Priority questions and outcomes
  • Web Annex 2. Changes from the approved scope of this guideline
  • Web Annex 3. Other WHO guidelines with recommendations relevant to routine postnatal care
  • Web Annex 4. Research implications
  • Web Annex 5. Implementation considerations specific to individual recommendations
• Web Supplement. Evidence base

This publication is the update of the document published in 2014 entitled “WHO recommendations on postnatal care of the mother and newborn”.

Suggested citation:

WHO recommendations on maternal and newborn care for a positive postnatal experience. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2022. Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO.

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