Scaling Up an Integrated Approach to Improve Delivery Care in North Guatemala With Stepped Wedge Design

Individual delivery data has been collected in site from health centers records. Thus, the study does not depend on official data from the ministry of health. Not only is MOH data hard to obtain, it also may not contain the details we are interested in that are put by hand by doctors and nurses in clinic histories. In order to get uniform data that fits the study needs, a parallel monitoring process has been set up. Data for mortality and morbidity events that occured in communities during the study is limited. We don't have the community counterpart of our indicators. Government data of perinatal deaths in community may be obtained with 1 or 2 years of delay, however there may be an underreporting of such events. Likewise, there is no data source for maternal morbidity in community deliveries since community practice is usually not documented nor reported.

The concept of perinatal mortality used in this study is not the standard concept that includes death from 28th gestational week to 7 days after birth. The perinatal mortality outcome in this study takes into account only deaths that occur during care in health centers (approximately 48 hours since birth). This is intentional since the aim of this study is to improve clinics' skilled delivery care, thereferore it is concerned on reducing the newborn deaths that occur during care given in site. Along this study, the focus is in these subset of perinatal deaths.

The APGAR measure 1 minute and 5 minutes after birth, and the reported procedures for the newborn are used to identify cases of perinatal morbidity.

This study is targetted to the low level health centers in Huehuetenango and Alta Verapaz. This includes 33 health centers. This is a fixed number of health centers and there is no control of the patients that got treated at the health centers. This is the reason why there is no sample size assessment. The selection of the health centers was limited by the definition of CAP (second level health facilities according to local definition) and the amount of patients that received the intervention by attending their deliveries in health centers can not be controlled.

Having data on all vaginal and uncomplicated deliveries that occur in health centers, the analysis can be done by individual cases and also by aggregating data in time periods. Also, analysis methodology of trials with stepped wedge design has been developed in the last years. A generalized mixed model for a multilevel and longitudinal analysis is going to be used in order to account for different sources of variability within and between health centers and times. So far (April 2017) we have done preliminary analysis this way and are confortable with this methodology selection.

Inclusion criteria

• For participating facilities, health centers in Huehuetenango and Alta Verapaz districts.
• For participating facilities, health centers of type "CAP" (centro de atención permanente) which is the second level of attention in Guatemala, after attention in home and community.
• For institutional deliveries events, vaginal deliveries attended in participating health centers.
• For perinatal morbidity and mortality, any child that is born from an eligible vaginal delivery.

Exclusion criteria

• For deliveries, cesarean sections are ignored, since the training is focused on vaginal delivery care.
• In a secondary analysis, perinatal mortality cases that occured before arrival to the health center are excluded.