Facility readiness and service provision in Mother and Child Welfare Centers (MCWCs) in Bangladesh: Where do we stand?

The government of Bangladesh (GOB) established Mother and Child Welfare Centers (MCWCs) in 1975 to provide specialized maternal, child health, and family planning (FP) services and to prevent complications during pregnancy and childbirth. The MCWCs are mandated to be equipped with emergency medicine, instruments, and trained and skilled staff. The MCWCs are located at the district, upazila, and union levels. The level of service provision and care is not the same at all levels due to differences in trained skilled staff, infrastructure (i.e., how many beds are allocated for service delivery), supplies, and equipment. MCWCs at the district level have more staff, equipment, and essential and emergency drugs for rendering comprehensive services to mothers and children than those at the upazila and union levels. There are, however, some common services available across all levels of MCWCs. At present, 96 MCWCs are functioning and providing reproductive health-emergency obstetric care (RH-EOC) services throughout the country under the leadership of the Directorate General of Family Planning (DGFP).

In 2019, the Mother and Child Health (MCH) unit of the DGFP requested assistance from MEASURE Evaluation/Data for Impact (D4I) and MaMoni MNCSP, Save the Children in development of a database on MCWCs readiness to provide health services based on the 2017 Bangladesh Health Facility Survey (BHFS) findings. The database to be developed would provide MCWC managers with up-to-date information on MCWC readiness to provide services, assist with estimating staff and logistic needs, and improve the raising of requisitions for depleted products and supplies. Managers at regional and central levels would be able to categorize the
readiness status of MCWCs and use the categorizations to make management planning decisions for service improvements in the MCWC system.

The 2017 BHFS dataset was provided by the National Institute of Population Research and Training (NIPORT) and analysis support was provided by the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b).