| Summary: | Background: Despite ongoing efforts, perinatal morbidity and mortality persist across
all settings, imposing a dual burden of clinical and economic strain. Besides, the
fragmented nature of economic evidence on perinatal health interventions hinders the
formulation of effective health policies. Our review aims to comprehensively and
critically assess the economic evidence for such interventions in high-income
countries, where the balance of health outcomes and fiscal prudence is paramount.
Methods and analysis: We will conduct a comprehensive search for studies using
databases including EconLit (EBSCO), Cost Effectiveness Analysis (CEA) Registry,
Medline (Ovid), Embase (Ovid), CINAHL Ultimate (EBSCO), Global Health (Ovid), and
PubMed. Furthermore, we will broaden our search to include Google Scholar and
conduct snowballing from the final articles included. The search terms will encompass
economic evaluation, perinatal health interventions, perinatal morbidity and mortality,
and high-income countries. We will include full economic evaluations, focusing on cost-
effectiveness, cost-benefit, cost-utility, and cost-minimisation analyses. We will exclude
partial economic evaluations, reports, qualitative studies, conference papers, editorials,
and systematic reviews. Date restrictions will limit the review to studies published after
2010 and those in English during the study selection process. We will use the modified
Drummond checklist to evaluate the quality of each included study. Our findings will
adhere to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses
(PRISMA) 2020 statement. A summary will be provided, including estimated costs,
effectiveness, benefits, and the incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (ICER). We also
plan to conduct a subgroup analysis. To aid comparability, we will standardise all costs
to the United States Dollar, adjusting them to their 2022 value using country specific
consumer price index and purchasing power parity.
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