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

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.

Conditions

• Malaria
• Malaria in Pregnancy

Interventions

OTHER

Group antenatal care (GANC)

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.

OTHER

Standard antenatal care

Routine antenatal care as recommended by th Ministry of Health of Tanzania

Sponsors & Collaborators

• Jhpiego

  collaborator OTHER

• Ministry of Health, Tanzania

  collaborator OTHER_GOV

• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

  lead FED

Principal Investigators

• Ruth Lemwayi, MD · Jhpiego

• Julie R Gutman, MD MSc · Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

• Mary Drake · Jhpiego

Study Design

Allocation

RANDOMIZED

Purpose

HEALTH_SERVICES_RESEARCH

Masking

SINGLE

Model

PARALLEL

Eligibility

Min Age

15 Years

Max Age

45 Years

Sex

FEMALE

Healthy Volunteers

No

Timeline & Regulatory

Start

2019-11-15

Primary Completion

2021-07-10

Completion

2021-07-10

Countries

• Tanzania

Study Locations