Delays in Achieving Maternal, Newborn, and Child Health Targets for 2021 and 2030 in Liberia

Background Every family expect to have a healthy mother and new born baby after pregnancy. Especially for parents, pregnancy is a time of great anticipation. Access to maternal and child health care insures safer pregnancy and its outcome. MWHs is one the strategy. The objective was to synthesize the best available evidence on effectiveness of maternity waiting homes on the reduction of maternal mortality and stillbirth in developing countries. Methods Before conducting this review non-occurrences of the same review is verified. To avoid introduction of bias because of errors, two independent reviewers appraised each article. Maternal death and stillbirth were the primary outcomes. Review Manager 5 were used to produce a random-effect meta-analysis. Grade Pro software were used to produce risk of bias summary and summary of findings. Result In developing countries, maternity waiting homes users were 80% less likely to die than non-users (OR = 0. 20, 95% CI [0.08, 0.49]) and there was 73% less occurrence of stillbirth among users (OR = 0.27, 95% CI [0.09, 0.82]). In Ethiopia, there was a 91% reduction of maternal death among maternity waiting homes users unlike non-users (OR = 0.09, 95% CI [0.04, 0.19]) and it contributes to the reduction of 83% stillbirth unlike non-users (OR = 0.17, 95% CI [0.05, 0.58]). Conclusion Maternity waiting home contributes more than 80% to the reduction of maternal death among users in developing countries and Ethiopia. Its contribution for reduction of stillbirth is good. More than 70% of stillbirth is reduced among the users of maternity waiting homes. In Ethiopia maternity waiting homes contributes to the reduction of more than two third of stillbirths. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12913-018-3559-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

A Maternity Waiting Home (MWH) is a facility, within easy reach of a hospital or health centre which provides Emergency Obstetric Care (EmOC). Women may stay in the MWH at the end of their pregnancy and await labour. Once labour starts, women move to the health facility so that labour and giving birth may be assisted by a skilled birth attendant. The aim of the MWH is to improve accessibility and thus reduce morbidity and mortality for mother and neonate should complications arise. Some studies report a favourable effect on the outcomes for women and their newborn. Others show that utilisation is low and barriers exist. However these data are limited in reliability. To assess the effects of a maternity waiting facility on maternal and perinatal health. We searched the Cochrane Pregnancy and Childbirth Group's Trials Register (April 2009), CENTRAL (The Cochrane Library 2009, Issue 1), MEDLINE (1966 to April 2009), EMBASE (1980 to April 2009), CINAHL (1982 to April 2009), African Journals Online (AJOL) (April 2009), POPLINE (April 2009), Dissertation Abstracts (April 2009) and the National Research Register archive (March 2008). Randomised controlled trials including quasi-randomised and cluster-randomised trials that compared perinatal and maternal outcome in women using a MWH and women who did not. There were no randomised controlled trials or cluster-randomised trials identified from the search. There were no randomised controlled trials or cluster-randomised trials identified from the search. There is insufficient evidence to determine the effectiveness of Maternity Waiting Facilities for improving maternal and neonatal outcomes.