and as a tool to ensure safe care—have three themes in common: regulation, provider centred focus and avoiding underuse of care. First, risk selection is viewed as both requiringandproviding regulation. Risk selection regulates allocation of tasks and responsibilities based on geographical, medical and/or financial criteria. In terms of risk detection and assessment and decision making about the delivery of care, risk selection regulates delivery of care, and is supported by local and international, monodisciplinary and multidisciplinary agreements. Risk selection as a tool to ensure safe care determines what is considered safe and is regulated by designated bodies. The second commonality is the provider centred focus; a small minority of the papers addressed women’s experiences. At the organisational and practice level women and children gain access to care only after risk is detected or confirmed by the provider. At the control level, outcome is predominantly viewed and evaluated as providers’ conduct. Thirdly, aligning needs and resources, assessing, detecting and deciding on risks, and risk selection as a means to ensure safe care share the focus of preventing underuse of care. Discussion We conducted this review to enhance the conceptual understanding of risk selection in MNC, which is necessary to optimise the organisation and practice of risk selection in MNC. The included 210 publications from 24 high income countries indicate that risk selection is a universal phenomenon, used to differentiate between what care should be provided and who should provide it to ensure women and children receive appropriate care, at the right place and the right time [13,14]. Thematic inductive synthesis identified three main dimensions of risk selection. (1) Risk selection is used at the level of health care organisation as a means to allocate resources, align women’s and children’s needs with healthcare services, and balance access to, and availability of resources with the perceived likelihood of needs, while ensuring timeliness of care. (2) At the practice level, risk selection refers to detecting and assessing risk and making decisions about delivery of care. (3) Risk selection is also used as a tool to ensure safe care. We found that these three dimensions have three themes in common: risk selection (1) is viewed as both requiring and providing regulation, (2) has a provider centred focus, and (3) aims to avoid underuse of care (Fig 1). Evaluating the quality of risk selection: The challenge of contextual diversity Our results show a paradox in the understanding of risk selection. On the one hand, risk selection is often assessed by cross-setting comparison, using quantitative, short-term, and infant outcome measures. On the other hand, our results emphasize the complexity of risk selection, showing that the operationalization of risk selection is highly contextualized, determined by numerous factors including geography, demography, government policy, laws and regulations, history and culture. For example, Scherjon and colleagues [20] and Papiernik and colleagues [22] discussed how these factors influence the organisation of risk selection in different countries. Some papers call for acknowledging the ambiguous nature of risk, emphasizing the constructionist character of risk [88,117,123,133,134,155,162], and address the impossibility to detect and eliminate all risks [47,53,94,163]. According to Reddy and colleagues [59] “it should be remembered that the risk status of a woman may change during the course of pregnancy”, and sometimes no measures can be found to improve care [30,31,164]. The paradoxical perception of risk selection as objective and measurable versus relative and contextual is present throughout the included papers. The complexity of risk selection, for instance, is often emphasized [17,26,31,61,88,104,109,116,117,142,165]. Nevertheless, scholars rarely consider complex ONE Risk selection in maternal and newborn care | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0234252 June 8, 2020 9 / 22 77 3 TOWARDS A BETTER UNDERSTANDING OF RISK SELECTION
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