The difficulty in measuring maternal mortality, including problems associated with costs, validity and reliability of existing methods, has led Immpact to develop methods that are cheaper, more reliable or easier to undertake in a developing country context.

This OAP study uses an interdisciplinary approach to explore the interrelated social, psychological, physical and economic consequences of complications during pregnancy and childbirth. Research methods are primarily anthropological and epidemiological, but can also be used in conjunction with economic and clinical evaluation of outcomes.

This presentation shows the economic outcomes, the valuation of maternal health outcomes, direct costs of safe motherhood programs and productivity costs of maternal mortality and morbidity.

This presentation gives a brief review of how stillbirths have been measured, what we know about the data quality from these approaches and present results of experimental efforts by Immpact to measure perinatal mortality in resource poor settings.

This tool describes a technique for measuring rates of maternal mortality in the community which offers potential cost and time savings over traditional house-to-house type surveys. The information given here is intended to help anyone in the process of commissioning a study to decide whether Sampling at Service Sites (SSS) will be a useful method; and to help anyone planning a measurement of maternal mortality using the SSS method to design and execute a survey.

This presentation covers the conferences objectives: To make the case for greater investment in women's health, and the multiple returns such an investment yields, accelerate progress towards MDGs 5, 4, 6, 3, and 2, and finally to engage public policy makers to improve women's health and rights within national plans and strategies.

This presentation measures the causes of WRA mortality more objectively.

This survey has worked to assess the value that individuals place on reducing maternal deaths in the community using the willingness to pay (WTP) technique.

One of the most important components of maternal health services is adequate, skilled human resources (Campbell and Graham, 2006; WHO, 2006). Paying and motivating this key resource is just as important as ensuring that enough workers are in place to provide the service. At the same time, health financing policy implementation especially in low-income countries requires hard decisions about priorities for channelling limited resources, and the use of staff incentives may come into competition with other claims for resource prioritization (Ensor and Ronoh, 2005). It is important, therefore, to be able to produce evidence for the desirability and expected efficacy of offering financial incentives to staff.
A methodology to assess the incentives to deliver maternal health services was developed out of three Immpact evaluations of maternal health care interventions in Ghana, Indonesia and Burkina Faso. Although in each of the initial Immpact evaluations (see Module 2 and Module 3 for more information) the effect on human resources was considered important, the initial development of this tool was undertaken during a project in Cambodia which examined the restructuring of the medical workforce in a context of very low public spending on wages. A key question in that study was to determine how great a financial incentive is required to ensure that public sector health workers remain in their posts rather than spending part of their working hours in private practice, leaving the public sector entirely, or engaging other activities to boost their income – alternative opportunities that often motivate public health workers in many, if not most, low- and middle-income countries.