PROTOCOL: Improving Maternal, Newborn and Women's Reproductive Health in Crisis Settings

Abstract

According to the WHO, the concept of maternal health is more focused and is defined as the health of women during pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum period. According to the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), humanitarian crises put women and their babies at increased risk of poor health outcomes as a result of a sudden loss of medical support, exacerbated in many cases by reduced access to information and essential social services, massive population displacement, trauma, malnutrition or disease, and exposure to violence (UNFPA 2010, UNFPA 2012, Lam 2012). During such crises, maternal and neonatal deaths, and physical and sexual violence increase, coupled with limited or no access to reproductive health services such as family planning, prenatal care, assisted delivery, and emergency obstetric care. [...]during humanitarian emergencies the effectiveness of the health system is severely disrupted resulting in the following ( Newbrander 2011): failure to provide health services to a large proportion of the population living in urban areas (while recognising that most rural areas are generally under-served even in normal times) and a lack of infrastructure (including facilities, human resources, equipment and supplies, and medicines) for delivering health services; poorly functional or absent referral systems for the critically ill; nonexistent or insufficient capacity-building mechanisms and systems, such as national clinical training programmes, to address the dearth of clinical and management capacity; poor co-ordination, oversight and monitoring of health services by the prevailing administrative authorities, who may not have the capability to manage; inequity in who receives the available health services, resulting in limited public health services for the