Overview

This guideline aims to improve the quality of essential, routine postnatal care for women and newborns with the ultimate goal of improving maternal and newborn health and well-being. It recognizes a “positive postnatal experience” as a significant end point for all women giving birth and their newborns, laying the platform for improved short- and long-term health and well-being. A positive postnatal experience is defined as one in which women, newborns, partners, parents, caregivers and families receive information, reassurance and support in a consistent manner from motivated health workers; where a resourced and flexible health system recognizes the needs of women and babies, and respects their cultural context.

This is a consolidated guideline of new and existing recommendations on routine postnatal care for women and newborns receiving facility- or community-based postnatal care in any resource setting.

Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms and abbreviations
• Executive summary
• 1. Introduction
  • 1.1. Background
  • 1.2. Target audience
  • 1.3. Scope of the guideline
• 2. Methods
  • 2.1. Contributors to the guideline
  • 2.2. Identifying priority questions and outcomes
  • 2.3. Integration of recommendations from published WHO guidelines
  • 2.4. Focus and approach
  • 2.5. Evidence identification and retrieval
  • 2.6. Quality assessment and grading of the evidence
  • 2.7. Formulation of the recommendations
  • 2.8. Decision-making during the GDG meetings
  • 2.9. Declaration of interests by external contributors
  • 2.10. Document preparation and peer review
  • 2.11. Presentation of guideline content
• 3. Evidence and recommendations
  • A. Maternal care
  • B. Newborn care
  • C. Health systems and health promotion interventions
• 4. Implementation of the WHO postnatal care recommendations
• 5. Dissemination
• 6. Applicability issues
• 7. Monitoring and evaluating the impact of the guideline
• 8. Updating of the guideline
• 9. References
• Annex 1. Contributors to the guideline
• Annex 2. Summary of declarations of interests from the Guideline Development Group (GDG) members and how they were managed
• Annex 3. Template “summary of judgements” table for evidence-to-decision domains
• Web Annexes
  • Web Annex 1. Priority questions and outcomes
  • Web Annex 2. Changes from the approved scope of this guideline
  • Web Annex 3. Other WHO guidelines with recommendations relevant to routine postnatal care
  • Web Annex 4. Research implications
  • Web Annex 5. Implementation considerations specific to individual recommendations
• Web Supplement. Evidence base

This publication is the update of the document published in 2014 entitled “WHO recommendations on postnatal care of the mother and newborn”.

Suggested citation:

WHO recommendations on maternal and newborn care for a positive postnatal experience. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2022. Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO.

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