Maternal-newborn health – Quality, equity and dignity for all

17 MAY 2016 | COPENHAGEN, DENMARK

A powerful new integrated maternal-newborn health advocacy campaign focused on quality, equity and dignity of care for all mothers and babies was launched at the Women Deliver conference. The Global Strategy for Women’s, Children’s and Adolescents’ Health (Global Strategy) calls for ending all preventable maternal and newborn mortality and stillbirths. Greater quality of care is needed to preserve and protect the health of both mothers and babies, especially for those hardest to reach and where crisis prevails.

This advocacy campaign supports the technical efforts by UN agencies to lay the groundwork for a strong country-focused drive for quality maternal and newborn care. The World Health Organization (WHO) has developed a set of quality of care standards for maternal and newborn health and is preparing a roadmap for implementation and scale up. Successful implementation of this roadmap requires an intentionally linked advocacy movement to support country implementation, influence supportive global and national policies and investments, and to unify all stakeholders in joint action through a strong communications campaign. This new maternal-newborn health advocacy effort emphasizes the human rights-based goals of equity, universal coverage, access to quality care services, and dignity and respect for all women and babies. The effort takes forward the implementation of the Every Newborn Action Plan (ENAP) and Strategies towards Ending Preventable Maternal Mortality (EPMM) to achieve the goals of Global Strategy.

The launch took place during a side event on Tuesday, 17 May, 2016. The event shared information about the new quality of care framework for maternal and newborn health led by WHO as well as to learned from different country experiences of successful improvements for quality, equity, and dignity for mothers and babies.

Read more about this event and other related events here.