MSH: Pregnancy clubs meet the needs of mothers-to-be

In comparison to the current one-on-one model, the group antenatal care model is increasingly recognised as being more responsive to women’s and healthcare providers’ needs, writes Shafia Rashid, principal technical adviser for the FCI Programme of MSH in her recent blog post.

Together with Management Sciences for Health (MSH), M4ID designed and customised a group antenatal care model for Uganda in the communities of Mbale and Bududa in 2016. Building on the successful Ugandan model and tools, M4ID was tasked in 2017 to adapt key elements of that model to Kenya using a human-centred design approach.

Rashid highlights the need to take into consideration different social and cultural contexts when designing pregnancy clubs.

“While the Uganda and Kenya pregnancy clubs share many common elements, we recognised that the service design needed to be adapted to respond to women’s and service providers’ needs in different settings, while also taking into account national standards and guidelines for maternal and newborn health.”

Rashid calls for identifying a common framework and agreeing on a set of core indicators for measurement, as countries beging rolling out their group ANC in different contexts.

Read the full blog post by Shafia Rashid here.
Read more about our work on group ANC here.