Effectiveness of Awareness Training on Birth Preparedness and Complication Readiness among Community Health Workers of New Delhi, India.

Background: In India, current maternal mortality ratio is 97/100,000 livebirths, and still more efforts are needed to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 3, target 1 of 70/100,000 livebirths. Women die because of complications during and following pregnancy and childbirth. Skilled care during and immediately after delivery has been identified as one of the key strategies in reducing maternal mortality. Birth preparedness and complication readiness (BPCR) has been implemented as a comprehensive strategy to fill this gap. BPCR is one of the key interventions to reduce the maternal mortality.

Materials and methods: This was a community-based before and after interventional study (quasi-experimental study) and was conducted in two randomly selected primary health centers of South West district of Delhi.

Results: A total of 152 community health workers (CHWs) took part in the study. About one fourth (22.03%) had knowledge regarding water breakage without labor, which increased to 85.53% after training and was statistically significant (P < 0.0001). Mean knowledge score preintervention was 4.35 (1.82), whereas the postintervention mean knowledge score was 8.98 (0.99) and was statistically significant (P < 0.0001).

Conclusion: Though awareness of CHWs on some aspects of the BPCR components was good before the training program, marked improvement was seen in most of the domains after the training session.