What is it about?
The Quality Maternal and Newborn Care (QMNC) Framework was published in the Lancet Series on Midwifery. This was a comprehensive synthesis of the evidence about what produces the best maternal and newborn care outcomes around the world. We successfully transformed this framework into a survey tool in a study based in the UK, Ghana, India and Australia, and showed that it is both valid and reliable in measuring women’s perceptions of the quality of care.
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Why is it important?
Good quality care produces good outcomes and needs to be reinforced. The elements of poor quality care need to be identified so that care delivery can be improved. The QMNCFi tracks care from early pregnancy through to the postnatal period. It will be of interest to maternity service managers and policy makers who want to benchmark their services. It can be used to compare different maternity units, different models of care, or (before-and-after) as a way of evaluating the impact of a change in service delivery.
Perspectives
This is the culmination of eight years of research. We initially developed the QMNC Framework for qualitative research and it proved very useful in highlighting specific issues of both good and bad care quality. The QMNC Framework index (QMNCFi) both develops and complements this earlier qualitative work, as both the survey and the focus groups / interviews can be run together. We have seen that both approaches work well in very different contexts. The QMNCFi is a valid, reliable and comprehensive tool for measuring maternity service user perceptions of the quality of care.
Dr Andrew Symon
University of Dundee
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Validating the Quality Maternal and Newborn Care Framework Index: A Global Tool for Quality‐of‐Care Evaluations, Birth, November 2024, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1111/birt.12895.
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