Prenatal Care

Abstract

Good antenatal care is the unborn baby’s best insurance for health. The first priority in perinatal medicine is to make such care widely available and to promote its acceptance, especially in rural areas. Both the number of antenatal visits and the quality of care provided are important. The ideal is to achieve one visit per month throughout pregnancy. If this target cannot be achieved, a minimum of five visits should be insisted upon, of which at least three should be in the last trimester. The quality of antenatal care is difficult to judge. Most antenatal clinics are conducted by auxiliaries with very little supervision. It has been suggested that the frequency with which blood pressure has been measured or haemoglobin has been estimated may be used as a criterion for judging the quality of care.