Efficacy of Evidence Based Care on Care Quality of Mother and Infant in 3 Teaching Hospitals: A Protocol

Reducing infant mortality rate during delivery is a priority in the world. Even with the existing activities that take place in hospitals, due to a lack of simple and effective methods, this mortality reduction trend is slow. The objects of this study were to apply and investigate the effects of WHO evidence-based guidelines for safe delivery on the quality of maternal and neonatal support. This is a semi-experimental study with external control. After forward and backward translation of WHO safe childbirth checklist, in an expert meeting irrelevant/infeasible items in the checklist were omitted or modified. Personnel performance on checklist items was evaluated by researchers who were present in the whole period of mother and neonate hospitalization in two phases. Intervention was done in two hospitals and one hospital was considered as control. At first, the instructions were provided for all the collaborating personnel in forms of pamphlets, posters and booklets and after two weeks second phase began by arranging an educational session for personnel. The data of these two phases is being compared. If our prior assumption be proved, we anticipate improvements in some items of checklist. Some of these items are skin contact, breast feeding rate in first hour postpartum, hand hygiene, and mother''s knowledge regarding the parturition during the time in which they are hospitalized together with a decrease in episiotomy infection/dehiscence prevalence. These changes can be regarded as an overall promotion in maternal/neonatal support.