In the 2016 Lancet Series on Maternal Health, there is a clarion call for "quality maternity care for every woman, everywhere: a call to action."1 The clarion is highly important, as each year approximately 210 million women are childbearing and 140 million babies are delivered.1 Authors have generated 5 priorities, which are listed later.1 Some progress was made through the implementation of Millennial Development goals adopted in 2010, but the goal for maternal health was not achieved. For example, in sub-Saharan Africa, women's lifetime risk of perinatal death is 1 in 36 compared with 1 in 4900 in high-resource countries, and each death is a tragedy.2

A new Sustainable Development agenda (SDG) was adopted in 2015, with the global target of a maternal mortality ratio of less than 70 (http://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/en/home/molgovreview/post-2015-development-a). It is essential that considerable strides be made to meet that goal. This issue focuses on global perinatal health in an effort to share the efforts of nurse researchers and clinicians around the world toward the achievement of this goal with our readers. Articles in this issue focus on the 5 priorities generated by The Lancet series1:

Priority 1: Quality perinatal healthcare services responsive to challenges.

In this issue, Forman and associates provide a critical clinical update on rapid implementation of Zika virus screening in an urban safety net hospital serving immigrant women in Boston. This is an example of health crises that develop and spread rapidly.

Priority 2: Equity through universal coverage of quality perinatal healthcare services, and Priority 3: Stronger healthcare systems.

In this issue, our Finnish nursing colleagues (Lamminpaa and associates) describe the utilization of register data in maternal health research by reviewing a few research studies using their registers. The perinatal and maternal mortality rates are among the lowest in the world in the country and their medical birth registers are well established. The use of "Big Data" is extremely helpful in documenting trends and intervention outcomes on a population level. Use of such data can also lead to the fulfillment of Priority 4: Sustainable funding for perinatal health.

Priority 5: Progress through evidence, advocacy, and accountability.

In this issue, information is provided on perinatal nursing research in light of the new SDGs. The goal of Callister and Corbett's special editorial is to describe priorities for such research, provide examples of global collaborative networking and research, identify research priorities, and describe exemplary global perinatal health nursing research. This is an update of an article published in The Journal of Perinatal & Neonatal Nursing in 2011.3 The sampling of global perinatal nursing research in this special issue should provide the impetus for improved clinical practice with diverse women all over the world.

In this issue, Corbett and colleagues provide rich qualitative data on Hmong women giving birth in northern Vietnam. Listening to the voices of childbearing women, provides critical insights to inform safe, respectful, quality, and culturally sensitive clinical care of diverse women giving birth in different sociocultural contexts.

Betegon and associates describe an outcomes evaluation of a program designed to reduce anxiety in childbearing women living in Spain with fetal intrauterine growth restrictions or fetuses that have been identified as small for gestational age. Crucial strategies to reduce maternal anxiety are identified. This is an example of implementation science, targeting the integration of evidence-based clinical practice.4

These descriptions of global clinical interventions and current nursing research findings should prove helpful to nurses caring for culturally diverse childbearing women in a variety of settings. It is utmost important that nurses understand that women using maternity services may have experiences of getting too little, too late, or too much too soon! Even in some cases, women are left without care.1 Nurses are the frontline experts in developing and using evidence-based care guidelines and providing support for women when giving birth as well as demanding updated education to become a skilled workforce. Nurses can also question the unnecessary use of routine interventions during birth as well as postpartum. As suggested by Women Deliver, "the time is now to learn from our shared experiences, replicate and scale-up successful interventions, apply new technologies and develop innovative processes and partnerships."5

In this issue, the neonatal section features articles that represent a truly global perspective on a variety of topics. Dr Franck and colleagues have reported on the experience of the parents of preterm infants in the United Kingdom, whereas Dr Shorey and her colleagues have reported on the perceptions of parents of preterm infants in Singapore. These articles are excellent examples of the importance of engaging families in newborn care. Three articles are from authors in South Africa. Dr Maree has reported on quality improvement for family-centered care in the neonatal intensive care unit, and Dr Lubbe has reported on compliance with best practice guidelines for neurodevelopmentally supportive care. Dr Cordenwener and colleagues have focused on professional nurses' perception of the skills required for performing preterm infant follow-up assessments. As always, we are grateful to our columnists, Sara Rostas, Joan Smith, and Terese Verklan, who give us their thoughtful reflections on various important aspects of neonatal nursing care.

-Katri Vehvilainen-Julkunen, PhD, Lic HC, MS, RN, RM

-Lynn Clark Callister, PhD, RN, FAAN

Perinatal Guest Editors

-Katherine Gregory, PhD, RN

Neonatal Editor

References