IDSA’s “Science Speaks”: Guinea study finds drops in facility-based births during West Africa Ebola crisis
In a guest post, Janine Barden O’Fallon of MEASURE Evaluation discusses results from a study in Guinea aimed at understanding “how the delivery and utilization of routine maternal, newborn, and child health services may have been affected by the strain Ebola placed on the health system and its clients.” O’Fallon notes, “We found some dramatic declines in service utilization in some of the Ebola-affected areas. … The decline was due to lack of service uptake during the outbreak. … Our review concluded that community-level factors were important to Guinea’s inability to contain Ebola, and that patients need to be central to health care systems in order to maintain high levels of service uptake during stressful times. As investments are building the capabilities and responsiveness of Guinea’s health system, the expectation is that communities will gain trust in these systems and utilize available services” (3/4).