Do strategies to improve quality of maternal and child health care in lower and middle income countries lead to improved outcomes? A review of the evidence.

ABSTRACT:

Objectives

Efforts to scale-up maternal and child health services in lower and middle income countries will fail if services delivered are not of good quality. Although there is evidence of strategies to increase the quality of health services, less is known about the way these strategies affect health system goals and outcomes. We conducted a systematic review of the literature to examine this relationship.

Methods

We undertook a search of MEDLINE, SCOPUS and CINAHL databases, limiting the results to studies including strategies specifically aimed at improving quality that also reported a measure of quality and at least one indicator related to health system outcomes. Variation in study methodologies prevented further quantitative analysis; instead we present a narrative re

SUBMITTER: Dettrick Z 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3857295 | biostudies-literature | 2013

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature