Abstract

Bangladesh experienced a dramatic decline in infant and under-5 mortality from 133 to 65 and 87 to 52 respectively whereas neonatal deaths only 52 to 37 deaths per 1000 live births during 1994 to 2007. The national level policies and guidelines related to child health, five series of Bangladesh Health and Demographic Survey (BDHS) reports, 507 articles published in PubMed have been studied to identify the information related to the objectives of the paper.

The average annual rate of reduction of children mortality was 9.4% in the age-group 1–4 years, 5.8% among 1–11 month old infants and only 2.6% for neonates, on the other aspect the overall rate of reduction of under-5 mortality was 4.9%. More than half (57%) of under-five deaths in Bangladesh occur in the neonatal period. Neonatal health has recently become a priority concern for government and UN and other organisations who have made contributions to develop policy guidelines to reduce infant mortality. The research related to neonatal health in different programmes shows that a post- delivery visit within 3 days by the health workers linked with strong supervision and monitoring system is the most important factor for reducing neonatal mortality. Thus, the programme design needs to focus on the quality monitoring and supervision system as well as improvement in the awareness activities among the community to ensure the target of reducing neonatal moratlity.