Background Despite the progress towards the MDG 4 and 5, compared to the developed world maternal and newborn deaths are still high in Bangladesh and poor quality of maternal and newborn health care is often blamed for this high mortality. This study assessed two important components of quality of maternal and newborn health care namely, infrastructure and performance of health care providers of public hospitals in Bangladesh.

Methods Cross sectional survey was conducted to measure the quality of infrastructures and assess the clinical care performance of the health care providers related to maternal and newborn services in 14 district and sub-district level public hospitals of Thakurgaon and Jamalpur districts. Six components including human resource, physical infrastructure, infection prevention, equipments/logistics/supplies, essential drugs and recordkeeping were assessed under infrastructure. Maternal and newborn care services provided by the health care providers were evaluated during antenatal, postnatal, delivery and newborn care. The study was conducted from November to December 2011. The average of the sub-items of each item was calculated and then the mean average of the items were estimated.

Results The percentage of mean average scores of all items of infrastructure for district hospitals, maternal and child welfare centres and upazila health complexes were 57.1%, 52.7% and 45.9% respectively, which were below the cut-off point (60.0%). None of the health care providers of three types of government hospitals obtained 100% score in any areas namely antenatal care, post-natal care, delivery care and newborn care.

Conclusions Quality of infrastructure of health facilities, and clinical care performance of the health care providers during discharging maternal and newborn health services were found poor in district and sub-district level public hospitals of Bangladesh.