Increasing the Utilization of Postpartum Care in Dobez Primary Health Care Center, Kirkuk, Iraq

The USAID Primary Health Care Project in Iraq (PHCPI) is collaborating with the Iraqi Ministry of Health (MOH) to improve the quality of primary health care in the country, with a special emphasis on maternal, newborn, and child health services in order to accelerate Iraq’s efforts to achieve its Millennium Development Goals (MDGS) of reducing child and maternal mortality. The project is currently supporting the MOH in transforming its approach to supervision of primary health care services from the traditional approach, where supervisors focus on mistake finding and report writing, to a supportive supervision approach, where supervisors are agents for quality improvement. To date, the project has trained over 90 supervisors across the country in supportive supervision. Following training, the supervisors formed quality improvement (QI) teams in their respective health facilities and provided on-the-job training and coaching to their teams. Training included identification of barriers to providing quality care, analyzing the causes of such barriers, and testing interventions or changes to overcome them. The following brief presents the results of QI activities at the Dobez Primary Health Care Center (PHCC) in Kirkuk Province of northern Iraq.