1. Prioritising health-care strategies to reduce childhood mortality, insights from Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance (CHAMPS): a longitudinal study
- Author
-
Madewell ZJ, Whitney CG, Assefa N, Bassat Q, Arifeen SE, Gurley ES, Jambai A, Kotloff KL, Madhi SA, Mandomando I, Ogbuanu IU, Onyango D, Scott JAG, Sow SO, Barr BAT, and Blau DM
- Abstract
BACKGROUND: Globally, mortality in children younger than 5 years has been decreasing over the past few decades, but high under-5 mortality persists across regions of sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia. Interventions-such as improved quality of clinical and antenatal care, better access to emergency obstetrical procedures, better triage and risk stratification, better immunisation coverage, or infection control measures-could substantially reduce deaths, but it is unclear which strategies could save the most lives. We aimed to use data from the Child Health and Mortality Prevention Surveillance (CHAMPS) network to examine which health-care and public health improvements could have prevented the most deaths. METHODS: We used standardised, population-based, mortality surveillance data collected by CHAMPS from seven sites (Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mali, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and South Africa) to understand preventable causes of death in children younger than 5 years. Deaths were investigated with minimally invasive tissue sampling, a post-mortem approach using biopsy needles for sampling key organs and body fluids. For each death, an expert panel reviewed case data to determine whether the death was preventable and (if preventable) provided recommendations as to how the death could have been avoided. We evaluated which health system improvements could have prevented the most deaths among those who underwent minimally invasive tissue sampling for each age group: stillbirths, neonatal deaths (aged
- Published
- 2022