Worldwide, maternal mortality is mostly caused by avoidable or treatable health complications, despite the progress made in maternal health. High-quality care focuses on a standardised and patient-centred approach. In this light, care bundles, which are sets of evidence-based practices, were introduced to improve the quality of care and maternal outcomes. The existing reviews on care bundles focus on specific conditions, and there is, to our knowledge, no comprehensive systematic review on the effectiveness and evidence-based character of care bundles on multiple maternal outcomes. This systematic review aims to describe maternal care bundles on labour and birth, to assess their effectiveness on maternal outcomes and to evaluate the evidence-based character of their interventions.

This systematic review will include randomised controlled trials, quasi-randomised studies, cohort studies, case-control studies, controlled before-and-after studies and interrupted-time-series studies, starting from 2001, focused on labour and childbirth stages, addressing care bundles that include multiple conditions. The search strategy will include six electronic databases (PubMed, Cochrane Library, CINAHL, Embase, Scopus and Web of Science) used to retrieve relevant titles and abstracts based on a database-specific search strategy. Titles and abstracts will be independently screened by two reviewers, followed by a full-text eligibility assessment. Reviewers will also extract data based on this review’s objectives and outcomes. Analysis will be performed in three phases: descriptive analysis, evaluation of the evidence-based character of interventions and quantitative synthesis analysis.

Ethics approval is not needed. Dissemination will be performed through publication in peer-reviewed journals, conference presentations and informing policies and stakeholders by offering a structured overview of maternal care bundles on labour and childbirth.

PROSPERO 2025 CRD420251081127.

Pre-eclampsia causes significant maternal and perinatal morbidity and mortality. It also causes changes in the cardiovascular, endothelial and metabolic systems, from which women may not fully recover after delivery. This study examined the association between the time of onset of pre-eclampsia and the risk for cardiovascular disease (using glucose tolerance, lipid profile and blood pressure) and renal function at 6 weeks post partum.

A prospective cohort study.

Lagos University Teaching Hospital, Idi-Araba, Mother and Child Centre, Gbaja, Surulere and Lagos Island Maternity Hospital, Lagos, Nigeria.

44 women with pre-eclampsia were studied and data on their sociodemographic characteristics, gestational age at diagnosis and blood pressure were collected on admission. They were followed up through delivery till 6 weeks post partum, when blood pressure check, 75 g oral glucose tolerance test, fasting lipid profile and serum creatinine were done.

The exposure was pre-eclampsia. The outcomes were cardiovascular disease risk markers, viz persistent hypertension, glucose intolerance and dyslipidaemia, and renal function at 6 weeks post partum in women who had pre-eclampsia.

Data were analysed using Stata V.16.1. Mann Whitney-U test was used to compare medians and Fisher's exact test was used to compare the categorical variables.

Of the women studied, 13 (29.5%) had early onset pre-eclampsia and 31 (70.5%) had late onset pre-eclampsia. Mean gestational age at diagnosis was 30.8±1.57 weeks in women with early-onset pre-eclampsia and 35.6±1.26 weeks in women with late-onset pre-eclampsia (p

The prevalence of persistent hypertension at 6 weeks post partum is high in women with pre-eclampsia. Serum triglyceride concentration was significantly higher in early onset compared with late onset pre-eclampsia; subsequent studies powered to determine the full cardiovascular risk and how long to follow postnatal women up will be beneficial.