Engaging community women's groups to improve maternal health care delivery in Cross River: Implementation research report

Abstract

Ending Eclampsia's main objective is to improve access to underutilized interventions and commodities by training community health extension workers in preventing, detecting (screening), and managing pre-eclampsia and eclampsia. While the broader project emphasizes primary health care interventions, this implementation research (IR) study focused on a community intervention in one state, in areas where the facility interventions were active. This final research report describes IR testing the feasibility and utility of employing women's groups as community platforms to increase women's access to quality antenatal service utilization, using pre-eclampsia screening as the entry point. The study was conducted in 48 communities in 12 local government areas of Cross River state in southern Nigeria. IR shows that community women's group platforms play an important role in educating women on their health and improving access to and utilization of quality maternal and child health services in Nigeria. The training and mentoring of women's group leaders was effective at improving knowledge of maternal health and increasing antenatal care service uptake.