The primary audience for this guideline includes health-care professionals who are responsible for developing national and local health-care protocols and policies, as well as managers of maternal and child health programmes and policy-makers in all settings. The guideline will also be useful to those directly providing care to pregnant women and preterm infants, such as obstetricians, paediatricians, midwives, nurses and general practitioners. The information in this guideline will be useful for developing job aids and tools for pre- and in-service training of health workers to enhance their delivery of maternal and neonatal care relating to preterm birth.

Contents

• Acknowledgements
• Acronyms and abbreviations
• Executive summary
• 1. Background
  • 1.1 Target audience
  • 1.2 Scope of the guideline
• 2. Methods
  • 2.1 WHO Steering Group
  • 2.2 Guideline Development Group
  • 2.3 External Review Group
  • 2.4 Identification of priority questions and critical outcomes
  • 2.5 Evidence identification and retrieval
  • 2.6 Quality assessment and grading of the evidence
  • 2.7 Formulation of recommendations
  • 2.8 Declaration of interests by external contributors
  • 2.9 Decision-making during the Technical Consultation
  • 2.10 Document preparation and peer review
• 3. Evidence and recommendations
  • 3.1 Maternal interventions
  • 3.2 Newborn interventions
• 4. Research implications
  • 4.1 Maternal research priorities
  • 4.2 Newborn research priorities
• 5. Dissemination and implementation of the guideline
  • 5.1 Guideline dissemination and evaluation
  • 5.2 Guideline implementation
• 6. Applicability issues
  • 6.1 Anticipated impact on the organization of care and resources
  • 6.2 Monitoring and evaluation of guideline impact
• 7. Updating the guideline
• References
• Annex 1 External experts and WHO staff involved in the preparation of the guideline
• Annex 2 Considerations related to the direction and strength of the recommendations
• Annex 3 Summary of declarations of interests from Guideline Development Group (GDG) members and how they were managed
• Evidence base

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