Ensuring high-quality postnatal care for women and newborns everywhere

In 2022, WHO published new recommendations on postnatal care for positive postnatal experience. These recommendations emphasise that women should benefit from at least 4 postnatal care contacts, to ensure optimal maternal and newborn health and well-being. However, postnatal care services remaining sorely lacking in many countries. Even in well-resourced health systems, postnatal care is often of variable quality, or fails to deliver on essential postnatal care practices for women and newborns. Projects are available for postgraduate research students to work with the Global Women’s and Newborn’s Health Group on this topic at the Burnet Institute in Melbourne. Available projects include: - Systematic review to explore the effects of postpartum care models that take a “longer than 6 weeks” approach, and how these might apply to limited-resource settings These projects would allow the successful candidate to gain experience in global maternal and newborn health research, systematic reviews and quantitative methodologies, with view to a scientific publication.