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The SPA Survey is a health facility assessment that provides a comprehensive overview of a country’s health service delivery.  SPA surveys collect information on the overall availability of different facility-based health services in a country and their readiness to provide those services and also include an inventory survey.  The SPA questionnaires were last updated in 2012. The SPA indicators and questionnaires are currently being revised to incorporate a greater focus on quality of care and are expected to be available by the end of 2021.

This survey can be used as a tool to search a Publication Catalog for any references and resources in different topic areas, type of publication, country, keywords, language, published from, and publication ID.

This framework is for improving the quality of care for mothers and newborns around the time of childbirth, developed by WHO and released in 2016, encompasses both the provision and experience of care. It contains eight domains of quality of care that should be assessed, improved and monitored within the context of the health system building blocks. 

The standards delineate what is expected in order to respect children’s rights: ensuring child, adolescent and family-friendly health facilities and services; evidence-based clinical care; availability of child and adolescent-specific appropriate equipment; appropriately trained, competent staff. The standards include health facility measures to facilitate implementation, to track improvement and to monitor performance. The standards are based on the eight domains of the framework for improving the quality of care and address the most common conditions that affect children and adolescents in health facilities.

Every year, 2.6 million babies die before turning one month old. One million of them take their first and last breaths on the day they are born. However, millions of these young lives could be saved every year if every mother and every baby had access to affordable, quality health care, good nutrition and clean water. This report addresses the challenges of keeping every child alive, and calls for strong cooperation among governments, businesses, health-care providers, communities and families to give every newborn a fair chance to survive, and to collectively work towards the achievement of universal health coverage, and a world where no newborn dies of a preventable cause.

This Monitoring Framework provides basic guidance on the monitoring and evaluation (M&E) needs for the Network for Improving Quality of Care for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health (the Network). The Monitoring Framework aligns with the Network goals, strategic objectives, implementation framework and World Health Organization (WHO) standards for improving maternal and newborn care in health facilities (2016)1 and the WHO standards for improving quality of care for children and young adolescents in health facilities (2018).2

There is evidence that continuous support during labour improves childbirth outcomes, including enhancing the physiological process of labour. Research has demonstrated that such continuous support has clinically meaningful benefits, including shorter labour with increased rates of spontaneous vaginal birth, decreased usage of intrapartum analgesia and caesarean section, and increased satisfaction with her childbirth experience. Women supported in this way have reported less fear and distress during labour, which also appeared to act as a buffer against adverse aspects of medical interventions.

Issued by WHO in 2020, these standards for the care of small and sick newborns in health facilities define, standardize and mainstream inpatient care of small and sick newborns, building on essential newborn care and ensuring consistency with the WHO quality of care framework. A resource for policy-makers, health care professionals, health service planners, program managers, regulators, professional bodies and technical partners.

The harmonized health facility assessment (HHFA) represents a resource package for conducting standardized health facility surveys. The HHFA enables a comprehensive, external review of the availability of health facility services, the systems that facilities have in place to deliver services at required standards of quality, and the effectiveness of the services. Availability, quality and effectiveness of health services are integral to universal health coverage (UHC) and contribute to achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). HHFA data can support health sector reviews, planning and policy-making, and enable evidence-based decision-making for strengthening country health services.

The HHFA builds upon the USAID/WHO Service Availability and Readiness Assessment (SARA) and incorporates components of other key global health facility surveys and indicator lists. It is based on global service standards and uses standardized indicators, questionnaires and data collection methodologies. Standardization of indicators and data collection promotes alignment of health facility survey approaches and enables comparability of results over time and across geographic areas.

We present a set of indicators that could be used to measure the effects of programs on RMC. Integrating these indicators into programs to improve quality of care and other health system outcomes will facilitate routine monitoring and accountability around experience of care.

Making sure women throughout the world can give birth in a health facility, in the presence of a midwife, is the best strategy for substantially reducing maternal mortality worldwide, according to a landmark series of papers.

This systematic review presents a comprehensive, evidence-based typology of the mistreatment of women during childbirth in health facilities, and demonstrates that mistreatment can occur at the level of interaction between the woman and provider, as well as through systemic failures at the health facility and health system levels. We propose this typology be adopted to describe the phenomenon and be used to develop measurement tools and inform future research, programs, and interventions.