Measuring Quality of Care and Effective Coverage for Newborn Health: Progress and Gaps

Data on intervention coverage (the proportion of individuals in need of an intervention who receive the intervention) and health service quality are essential for identifying under-served populations and gaps in service delivery, and for developing and evaluating quality improvement initiatives and maternal and newborn health programs. Traditional measures of intervention coverage do not account for the quality of the services received; effective coverage (EC) is an approach to incorporating quality in coverage measures. However, this area of newborn health metrics is rife with gaps: gaps in available data on coverage, readiness, and service quality for newborns, and gaps in the methods for assessing service quality and estimating effective coverage. These gaps limit our ability to understand the care currently received by newborns across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), making it more difficult to develop evidence-based programs and interventions. This panel will present recent research that aims to define and address some of these gaps, including the development of methods and indices to assess service quality for newborn health; assessment of readiness and quality data on newborns in facility registers and routine data systems; and development of EC cascades and measures for postnatal care, care for small and sick newborns, and feeding small and sick newborns.