Assessing the Impact of Group Antenatal Care on IPTp Uptake in Tanzania

Plain-language summary

Group antenatal care (GANC) is a service delivery model where women with pregnancies of similar gestational age are brought together for antenatal care (ANC), incorporating information sharing and peer support. This model provides selected aspects of clinical care to women in the group at the same time during group visits, as well as creating a support group of women at a similar stage in pregnancy, to improve the quality of care and engagement of women in the ANC process, ultimately leading to better retention in care. Initial studies have suggested that this improves uptake of intermittent preventive treatment in pregnancy (IPTp) among women who participate, but have not evaluated the effect at community level. The investigators propose to assess whether use of the GANC model in Tanzania can improve the quality of ANC as compared to standard individual ANC, by measuring uptake of recommended interventions, primarily IPTp. Recent data from Tanzania and Kenya suggest that malaria parasitemia prevalence among pregnant women correlates with the prevalence among children under five, and could be used to track trends over time.3-5 The very high coverage of ANC (\>80% attending at least one ANC contact), suggests that pregnant women could be a good sentinel population that could be readily tracked over time. However, pregnant women represent only about 5% of the overall population, thus, it is important to demonstrate that the trends in malaria prevalence and household level coverage of interventions reported by pregnant women attending ANC is representative of coverage among the general population. If validated, these data could be used to augment or even replace the data on coverage of interventions collected through the use of malaria indicator surveys, which are expensive and infrequently conducted, and generally only powered to the regional level.

Who can participate

What they're measuring

Trial details