Going to scale with professional skilled care

Because most women prefer professionally provided maternity care when they have access to it, and since the needed clinical interventions are well known, we discuss in their paper what is needed to move forward from apparent global stagnation in provision and use of maternal health care where maternal mortality is high. The main obstacles to the expansion of care are the dire scarcity of skilled providers and health-system infrastructure, substandard quality of care, and women's reluctance to use maternity care where there are high costs and poorly attuned services. To increase the supply of professional skilled birthing care, strategic decisions must be made in three areas: training, deployment, and retention of health workers. Based on results from simulations, teams of…