Effectiveness of utilizing the WHO safe childbirth checklist on improving essential childbirth practices and maternal and perinatal outcome: A systematic review and meta-analysis

INTRODUCTION: The World Health Organization (WHO) Safe Childbirth Checklist (SCC) is a 29-item checklist based on essential childbirth practices to help health-care workers to deliver consistently high quality maternal and perinatal care. The Checklist was intended to reduce maternal and perinatal mortality and address the primary cause of maternal death, intrapartum stillbirth, and early neonatal death. The objective of this review was to locate international literature reporting on the effectiveness of utilizing the WHO safe childbirth checklist on improving essential childbirth practices, early neonatal death, stillbirth, maternal mortality, and morbidity. METHODS: We searched MEDLINE, google scholar, Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials (CENTRAL), met-Register of Controlled Trials (m-RCT) (www.controlled-trials.com), ClinicalTrials.gov (www.clinicaltrials.gov) and the WHO International Clinical Trials Registry Platform (ICTRP) (www.who.int/stop/search/en) to retrieve all available comparative studieshttp://www.opengrey.eu/ published in English after 2008. Two reviewers did study selection, critical appraisal, and data extraction independently. We did a random or fixed-effect meta-analysis to pool studies together and effect estimates were expressed as an odds ratio. Quality of evidence for major outcomes was assessed using the Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, development, and evaluation(GRADE). RESULTS: We retained three cluster randomized trials and six pre-and-post intervention studies reporting on WHO SCC's. The WHO SCC utilization improved quality of preeclampsia management(moderate quality of evidence) (OR = 7.05 [95% CI 2.34–21.29]), maternal infection management(moderate quality of evidence) (OR = 7.29[95%CI 2.29–23.27]), Partograph utilization(moderate quality of evidence) (OR = 3.81 [95% 1.72–8.43]), postpartum counselling(low quality of evidence) (RR = 132.51[95% 49.27–356.36]) and still birth(moderate quality of evidence) (OR = 0.92[95% CI 0.87–0.96]). However, the utilization of the checklist had no impact on early neonatal death (very low quality of evidence) (OR = 1.07[95%CI [1.01–1.13]) and maternal death (low quality of evidence) (OR = 1.06[95% CI 0.77–1.45]). CONCLUSIONS: Moderate quality of evidence indicates that WHO SCC utilization is effective in reducing stillbirth and Improving preeclampsia management, maternal infection management and partograph utilization Low quality of evidence indicates that WHO SCC is effective in enhancing postpartum danger sign counseling. Low and very low quality of evidence suggests that WHO SCC has no impact on maternal and early neonatal death, respectively.