Community-based delivery of interventions for newborn health may prevent over one million neonatal deaths every year if universal coverage is achieved. A core element of newborn health programs is the promotion of optimal newborn care practices at home. Designing program strategies to achieve high intervention coverage and effectiveness requires site-specific information on existing practices, barriers and facilitating factors for adopting optimal practices, as well as identifying key decision makers in the family, and the channels through which the intervention can reach them. Although this information is often collected through formative research for the development and evaluation of interventions in the context of research studies, it is not usually available to maternal and child health programs. Furthermore, formative research findings are often unpublished—or only provided in brief as part of papers reporting the results of evaluation of interventions. Information on the formative data gathering process and on the practices they explore is often relegated to unpublished reports. This information, however, would be highly valuable when planning for intervention development in the programmatic context.
The World Health Organization organized a workshop on formative research for newborn health interventions in Udaipur, India, in April 2006. The workshop aimed to bring together formative research experiences and data from recently completed and ongoing studies to evaluate newborn health interventions. The workshop was attended by investigators from nine studies funded by the Saving Newborn Lives Programme of Save the Children (USA), Department for International Development (UK) and the World Health Organization in South Asia and Africa.
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