The estimated 2.6 million stillbirths in 2015 form an important part of the unfinished agenda for maternal and newborn health in the SDG era. The Every Newborn Action Plan and the Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s, and Adolescents’ Health both call for stronger evidence to accelerate the progress to prevent stillbirths and reach the global target of 12 or fewer stillbirths per 1,000 total births in every country by 2030.
To address this need, UNICEF and the World Health Organization (WHO) are working with United Nations Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (UN IGME) and its Technical Advisory Groups to generate reliable trend estimates of stillbirth to track progress towards the stillbirth rate targets. More data is required to improve the robustness of stillbirth estimates, especially from low- and middle-income (LMIC) settings, which don’t have robust national administrative data sources, such as CRVS.
UNICEF and WHO are currently updating the global database on stillbirths and intrapartum stillbirths. As part of this work, we would like to invite you to contribute stillbirth data from LMICs which meet the following criteria:
- Community/population-based overall stillbirth data OR
- Overall stillbirth data from facilities accounting for at least 80% of births in a given population with no major referral bias OR
- Intrapartum stillbirth data
We are particularly interested in datasets where stillbirth rate data have been collected using both birthweight ≥1000g and ≥28 weeks definition. This information will be important to improve the understanding of the impact of these different definitions on population stillbirth rates in various settings.
Confidentiality will be ensured, and the data will be strictly used for these analyses only.
To contribute data, please complete the standard template available for download here. Further instructions are available in the Excel. If you have collected data using both a birthweight and a gestational age cut-off, please complete the form using separate rows for each definition. If you have any questions please contact us. I am also attaching the template if easier.
Please submit your data to Hannah.Blencowe@lshtm.ac.uk and morana@who.int by 12th April 2019.