Does postnatal care have a role in improving newborn feeding? A study in 15 sub-Saharan African countries.

J Glob Health

Department of Maternal and Child Health, Gillings School of Global Public Health, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, USA.

Published: December 2017

Background: Breastfeeding is known as a key intervention to improve newborn health and survival while prelacteal feeds (liquids other than breastmilk within 3 days of birth) represents a departure from optimal feeding practices. Recent programmatic guidelines from the WHO and UNICEF outline the need to improve newborn feeding and points to postnatal care (PNC) as a potential mechanism to do so. This study examines if PNC and type of PNC provider are associated with key newborn feeding practices: breastfeeding within 1 day and prelacteal feeds.

Methods: We use data from the Demographic and Health Surveys for 15 sub-Saharan African countries to estimate 4 separate pooled, multilevel, logistic regression models to predict the newborn feeding outcomes.

Findings: PNC is significantly associated with increased breastfeeding within 1day (OR = 1.35,  < 0.001) but is not associated with PLFs (OR = 1.04,  = 0.195). PNC provided by nurses, midwives and untrained health workers is also associated with higher odds of breastfeeding within 1 day of birth (OR = 1.39,  < 0.001, (OR = 1.95,  < 0.001) while PNC provided by untrained health workers is associated with increased odds of PLFs (OR = 1.20,  = 0.017).

Conclusions: PNC delivered through customary care may be an effective strategy to improve the breastfeeding within 1 day but not to discourage PLFs. Further analysis should be done to examine how these variables operate at the country level to produce finer programmatic insight.

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Source
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5785869PMC
http://dx.doi.org/10.7189/jogh.07.020506DOI Listing

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