Assessment of maternal and child health care services performance in the context of COVID-19 pandemic in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia: evidence from routine service data

Abstract

Plain English summary The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is the worst global health crisis of a century. In many settings, health care service provision has been modified to focus on managing COVID-19 cases, and this has been affecting the provision of health services including maternal and child health services. The aim of this study was to assess the trends in maternal and child health services performance in the era of COVID-19 pandemic in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The results of the studies showed post-delivery care, new family planning attendees, safe abortion care and number of under-5 years old children treated for pneumonia decreased during the first 8 months of the COVID-19 pandemic compared to the previous 8 months’ average performance. The trends in antenatal care (care during pregnancy), new family planning attendees, pentavalent-3 vaccination and under-five children treated for pneumonia began to decline between January-March 2020, a quarter when the COVID-19 pandemic began; with accelerated declines in April to June 2020 following national lockdown. The trends for the stated services began to increase during July–September 2020, the last quarter of national lockdown. Family planning attendees and pentavalent-1 vaccination continued to decline and showed no recovery until January–March 2021when this study was completed. Implementing COVID-19 prevention measures and assuring the community about the safety of service delivery is imperative to ensure continuity of the maternal and child health services. Regular monitoring and evaluation of services performance is required to identify slowly recovering services and respond to potentially volatile changes during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Keywords

• COVID-19
• Pandemic
• Maternal
• Child
• Health services
• Routine service data