Facilitating Knowledge Exchange to Improve Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health

Rakkshet Singhaal, Programme Associate, Community Systems Foundation

Seth Davis, Programme Advisor, Community Systems Foundation

The World Health Organization’s (WHO) Quality of Care (Qoc) Network is a partnership across 11 governments that aims to build and strengthen national institutions and mechanisms for improving the quality of care in the health sector. The QoC Network plays a crucial role in facilitating country engagement and supporting Reproductive, Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (RMNCH) initiatives around the world to combat long-standing health sector challenges, such as pregnant women or newborns dying somewhere in the world every 11 seconds during childbirth. [1]

To support the Network’s advocacy and knowledge exchange around the quality of care, Community Systems Foundation (CSF) partnered with WHO to develop the Quality of Care Network website. Built with the Drupal 8 Content Management System (CMS), the QoC website facilitates the sharing of best practices to and between the partners to improve planning and delivery of healthcare across countries in Africa and Asia. 
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The engagement between WHO and CSF began in 2013 with the formation of the Life-Saving Commodities Practitioners' website, which sought to bring together specialists and resources to encourage more comprehensive access and better use of life-saving RMNCH innovations and techniques. As the predecessor to the Quality of Care Network, the lessons learned helped to ensure that the Quality of Care website was equipped fully with quality of care resources and engagement tools. Major components of the Quality of Care website include: a knowledge library, country pages and a one-of-kind webinar repository.

The Quality of Care Network knowledge library is a compilation of MNCH quality of care standards, guidance and tools, training, and essential learning materials. With over 250 resources in both English and French, the 11 network countries are able to better understand all aspects of quality of care. Additionally, the website offers engaging ways to interact with these publications. For example,  the online publication titled Integrating Stakeholder and Community Engagement in Quality of Care Initiatives for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, makes dense resources more accessible.

Experts and officials from various government agencies benefit from the Quality for Care Network's country page as they have access to numerous programs and policies implemented by states to alleviate MNCH-related difficulties. In addition, it allows the country to learn from the experience of other countries and make informative decisions. The country page includes each country’s vision regarding MNCH and its participation at the regional and global levels to address the problem. It consists of a list of all the initiatives and approaches undertaken by the country at the national and sub-national level and the network of organizations, public and private, working in the country and specific areas of their working.

The network provides partner countries with a place to inform users about upcoming webinars on MNCH, as well as a repository of all past webinars, so they are easily accessed. The network categorizes all webinars convened by the Quality of Care Network since 2017 into nine different series, making it the only super-categorized webinar page for MNCH. Several of these include “Transforming care for small and sick newborns,” “Engaging the private sector for quality MNCH care” and “Implementation experiences from the Quality of Care Network Countries.”

As a partner for nearly a decade, CSF and WHO continue to work together to improve knowledge sharing, coordination and transparency among countries related to RMNCH. CSF reiterates its commitment to assisting WHO through technology aimed at reducing the global impact of MNCH.

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[1] World Health Organization, More women and children survive today than ever before – UN report, 2019. Accessed at: https://www.who.int/news/item/19-09-2019-more-women-and-children-survive-today-than-ever-before-un-report