Simple interventions to improve infant care in the community may include women support groups, family members and the village health teams to encourage infant feeding, skin-to-skin care, and community healthcare worker assessments to identify and treat neonatal sepsis.
Attempts were also made to improve infant care during this period, including increasing the staffing of 'well baby' services in both communities and introducing a training program that many nurses took 'on-line' to improve their knowledge in child health and development.
The governments of 189 countries adopted the Millennium Goals in 2000, committing themselves to take concrete steps toward eradicating extreme poverty and hunger, making primary education universal, promoting equality between the sexes, improving infant health care, reversing environmental damage, and fostering worldwide cooperation for development.
Lessons learned Considering the continued high level of undernutrition in India, it is important to demonstrate that low-cost changes can be made to the existing ICDS to significantly improve infant and child care and that these changes can lead to nutritional improvements in a limited period of time.
WHO has recommended that integrating child health services with PMTCT will likely improve infant retention in care [52].
It used a participatory approach and a mixed method design to inform interventions led by health service staff to improve maternal infant care for remote dwelling families in northern Australia.
We also present an epigenetic model of the potential effects of maternal care on improving infant neurobehavioral status.
There is an urgent need to take a more holistic and ecological approach [ 30] to improving infant feeding outcomes by ensuring postnatal care, research intervention design, and wider community and policy are congruent with family wellbeing goals.
It has previously been demonstrated that a single consultation provided in a primary health-care setting can improve infant sleep by up to 14.6 h/week.
For home visits, training sessions covered knowledge and skills for counselling to improve Infant and Young Child Feeding practices, care-seeking for common childhood illnesses, and household-based strategies to prevent illness including handwashing, safe handling of water and food, and disposal of faeces.
