India joins 8 nations to improve quality of care around birth

He said the participants from India including government nominees deliberated on a roadmap to improve the QoC for maternal and newborn health in India with the partners of the network.

The partners include the WHO, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF), the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the UNICEF among others.

He said the network advocates bettering the quality of care through alignment of National Quality Assurance System with the WHO QoC guidelines in order "to improve maternal and newborn health and piloting the district implementation model in selected states and districts".

It also enables quality assurance teams at healthcare facilities to monitor and implement the QoC measures using the PDSA (Plan-Do-Study-Act) cycle.

It aims to bring in a culture of quality at the healthcare facilities to promote positive and sustainable health outcomes, he said.

"Learnings from these pilots are to be documented for probable scale-up under the National Quality Assurance programme," the Minister said.