Effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on maternal, newborn, and child health service coverage in Burkina Faso

Background: While countries' coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) emergency contingency and response plans aimed to prevent and control the spread of the virus, they also caused major disruptions to health services. We assessed the effects of COVID-19 on coverage and inequalities in select maternal, newborn, and child health services in Burkina Faso.

Methods: We analysed data from two cross-sectional household surveys conducted in two provinces, one rural and one urban. The first survey of 3375 households was conducted immediately before the pandemic (February to March 2020) and the second survey in the same areas two years after the pandemic (May to June 2022) using a similar methodology. We compared the coverage of maternal, newborn, and child health interventions and care-seeking between the two surveys to assess the effects of the pandemic on maternal, newborn, and child health services.

Results: Our findings did not show significant disruptions in coverage of antenatal service, postnatal care for mothers and babies, child routine vaccination, and care-seeking for sick children during the pandemic. However, there was a dramatic drop of the number of women (23 percentage points) accompanied by their partners for delivery as well as the number of caesarean-section deliveries in urban areas. The shortage of health staff, facility congestion, fear of getting COVID-19 after a caesarean-section admission, and prioritisation of critical health services such as emergency caesarean-section to the detriment of elective cases may explain the decline of caesarean-section rates.

Conclusions: COVID-19 did not cause major reversals in the coverage of maternal, newborn, and child health services in Burkina Faso, except for caesarean sections. We also saw no substantial increases in service coverage. In the absence of a counterfactual, we could not attribute the stagnation to the pandemic. However, the very low proportion of women reporting disruption in care-seeking suggests some resilience of the health systems to mitigate the negative impacts of the pandemic.