About Us
The Oxford Maternal & Perinatal Health Institute was founded in 2009 under the aegis of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford. We engage medical researchers, social scientists and health management experts in some of the major issues affecting the health of mothers and newborn babies, particularly in resource-poor settings. We are running 5 large, global studies involving over 350 researchers from in 18 countries. We are dedicated to improving perinatal health globally and committed to reducing the millions of preventable newborn deaths resulting from preterm birth or poor intrauterine growth.
The International Fetal and Newborn Growth Consortium for the 21st Century, or INTERGROWTH-21st was the first global study and multidisciplinary network which arose from the need for international growth standards to measure and improve maternal and newborn clinical care, and compare outcomes across populations. Such standards already existed to monitor the growth of infants and children. They are the WHO Child Growth Standards, and their release in 2006 was a landmark achievement. These scientifically based standards are now used worldwide. Our aim was to extend the WHO Child Growth Standards into the fetal and neonatal period, providing tools for continuity of care from conception to 5 years of age.
The INTERGROWTH-21st Consortium implemented three population-based studies using standardized methods, and clinical and research protocols. We gathered a rich body of data on health, growth and nutrition from pregnancy to early infancy from close to 60,000 women and newborns across five continents, making the INTERGROWTH-21st Project the largest collaborative venture in the field of perinatal health research to-date.
The resulting data provide unique insights into growth and development for the 21st century. The findings also provide new ways of classifying preterm and small for gestational age newborns. In addition, we have produced a new international equation for estimating gestational age through ultrasound early in pregnancy based on the first international crown-rump length standards, and we have developed the resources necessary for enabling the adoption and scale-up of these tools at all levels of the health care system.
The World Health Organisation officially recommended the use of the INTERGROWTH-21st standards in 2016, at the height of the Zika epidemic. Since then, our team has assisted thousands of health care professionals in the implementation of the standards at a global level.
From there, we developed four other global projects: INTERBIO-21st, INTERPRACTICE, INTER-NDA, and INTERCOVID.
Our studies are funded by:
