Background: The World Health Organization (WHO) developed the Safe
Birth Checklist (SCC) to facilitate best practices in safe birthing
practices. The SCC is utilizing existing evidence-based WHO guidelines
and recommendations which has combined those into a single and
practical bedside tool. The SCC is the first checklist-based
intervention to target the prevention of maternal and neonatal deaths.
Objective: The objective of this project was to pilot-test the World
Health Organization Safe Childbirth Checklist with Maternity Regional
Hospital in, Tanzania. Study Design and Methods: Retrospective analysis
on 35 charts were completed to identify presence or absence of
documentation aligned with evidenced based checklist items. Staff
training, end user observations and focus group discussions were
utilized to elicit feedback about the tool and the process. Descriptive
statistics and manual content analysis were used to analyze the rate of
uptake and ownership over the checklist. The Checklist is broken down
into four sections or time points (that are considered natural pause
points in the care of laboring women). The four different pause points
are admission, delivery, post-partum, and discharge Results: We trained
26 participants out of 32 staff how to use the SCC. Delivery time point
had the lowest at SCC completion rate at 39% compared to discharge
having the highest completion rate at 93%. There was variation in
completion rate of the checklist items at each time point. Checklist
items at the beginning of each time point were completed between 94%
and 100% of the time with the latter checklist list items completed
between 29% and 57% of the time Conclusion: This project was able to
identify facilitators and potential barriers to the successful uptake
of the Safe Childbirth Checklist in Shinyanga Regional Hospital. Based
on these findings, the MOH have opportunities to utilize those findings
in the scale-up of the implementation of the checklist and future
evaluation activities