When 2 Become 1: Integrating the Health Care needs of Mothers and Infants, the New MHTF-PLOS Collection on Maternal Health

In November 2013, PLOS Medicine and the Maternal Health Task Force (MHTF) called for submissions to Year 3 of the MHTF-PLOS Collection on Maternal Health. Today we launch the Year 3 Collection and include 10 research articles recently published by PLOS.

The continuing collaboration between the MHTF at Harvard School of Public Health and PLOS Medicine is reflected in this latest collection highlighting the theme, “Integrating Health Care to Meet the Needs of the Mother–Infant Pair”. Our shared commitment to increasing the evidence base for approaches to improving maternal health has built a platform of research and commentary articles as featured in the preceding Year 1 & Year 2 Collections.

This year’s theme was chosen with the aim to contribute to a better understanding of how and when to comprehensively integrate maternal and infant health care. This includes conditions such as HIV, malaria, exposure to environmental risks, and other situations that have a significant impact on both maternal and infant health.

Through the collection we hope to provide a platform for the dissemination of new evidence and offer a venue for analyses of conditions that affect both mothers and infants, whilst keeping in mind the role that the integration of care provides in the context of Universal Health Coverage (UHC) in the Post-2015 development agenda.

Featured articles in this third collection include a qualitative research study by Matilda Ngarina and colleagues describing the views of Tanzanian women on the new WHO guidelines relating to different methods of prevention from mother to child transmission of HIV during breastfeeding. A research article published in February by Abbey Byrne et al. addressed what works in the delivery of health care in hard-to-reach mountainous areas of low and lower-middle income settings. Another inclusion from Anayda Portela and colleagues focuses on a synthesis of existing training materials for community health workers in different components of sexual, reproductive, maternal, newborn, child, and adolescent health in order to identify gaps and opportunities to strengthen the capacity of community health workers in this field.

The call for papers is still open – please do submit your papers soon so that your submission can be considered in time for this year’s collection. Please submit via the PLOS Medicine submission system, with a clear statement in the cover letter that you are intending to submit to the ‘Maternal Health Task Force Collection’.

To read the Call for Papers or for more information on the Collections please visit: www.ploscollections.org/maternalhealth

Post authored by: Jennifer Horsley, Editorial Project Coordinator, PLOS Collections