Publications by authors named "Melinda Kay Munos"
Introduction: Recent modelled estimates suggest that Niger made progress in maternal mortality since 2000. However, neonatal mortality has not declined since 2012 and maternal mortality estimates were based on limited data. We researched the drivers of progress and challenges.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Bangladesh experienced impressive reductions in maternal and neonatal mortality over the past several decades with annual rates of decline surpassing 4% since 2000. We comprehensively assessed health system and non-health factors that drove Bangladesh's success in mortality reduction.
Methods: We operationalised a comprehensive conceptual framework and analysed available household surveys for trends and inequalities in mortality, intervention coverage and quality of care.
Article Synopsis
- Measuring quality of care in low- and middle-income countries is challenging due to the absence of a universal definition and limited guidance on appropriate quality indicators for antenatal care (ANC).
- The study developed and compared nine indices for facility readiness and three for the provision of care through various methods of selecting and combining items, analyzing their statistics and classifications.
- Results indicated that while indices were similar in many respects, those created using principal components analysis showed more differences, suggesting variability in how ANC service quality is measured.
Article Synopsis
- - The current methods for measuring coverage in reproductive, maternal, newborn, and child health (RMNCH+N) fail to account for service quality, making it hard to assess overall health improvements.
- - A new six-step framework proposes a systematic approach to measure both crude and quality-adjusted coverage, identifying gaps between the two across various RMNCH+N interventions.
- - A review of 8,103 articles highlighted a significant variability in methodologies and found that quality-adjusted coverage levels were considerably lower than crude coverage, emphasizing the need for standardization and better data collection in future research.