The WHO Labour Care Guide for Labour and Childbirth and Early Postnatal Care

In 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) released recommendations on intrapartum care to promote positive childbirth experiences. A need was identified for a new clinical tool to replace the WHO partograph which enables health workers to monitor a woman during labour and offer timely, evidence-based interventions.  

The updated, new generation partograph is the Labour Care Guide (LCG) emphasises respectful maternity care and helps ensure supportive interventions (labour companionship, pain relief, mobility in labour, food/fluid intake and birth position) are routinely offered. The tool was demonstrated to be feasible for, and accepted by providers in limited-resource settings and has been subsequently adopted as the WHO’s standard of care tool worldwide.

Research by ARPAN Investigators in India show that routine LCG use can safely reduce unnecessary obstetric interventions and promote woman-centred care during labour and childbirth. This project co-ordinates further implementation research in two other Asia-Pacific countries which will generate the necessary evidence to further LCG scale-up at regional and global levels.

Additional resources

Read more about implementing the WHO Labour Care Guide on Burnet Institute's website.

Read a research article about implementing the WHO Labour Care Guide to reduce the use of Caesarean section in India.

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