Article Text
Abstract
Introduction There is a limited understanding of the importance of respectful maternity care on utilisation of maternal and newborn health services. This study aimed to determine how specific hypothetical facility birth experience of care attributes influenced rural Nigerian women’s stated preferences for hypothetical place of delivery.
Methods Attributes were identified through a comprehensive review of the literature. These attributes and their respective levels were further investigated in a qualitative study. We then developed and implemented a cross-sectional discrete choice experiment with a random sample of 426 women who had facility-based childbirth to elicit their stated preferences for facility birth experience of care attributes. Women were asked to choose between two hypothetical health facilities or home birth for future delivery. Choice data were analysed using multinomial logit and mixed multinomial logit models.
Results Complete data for the discrete choice experiment were available for 425 of 426 women. The majority belonged to Fulani ethnic group (60%) and were married (95%). Almost half (45%) had no formal education. Parameter estimates were all of expected signs suggesting internal validity. The most important influence on choice of place of delivery was good health system condition, followed by absence of sexual abuse, then absence of physical and verbal abuse. Poor facility culture, including an unclean birth environment with no privacy and unclear user fee, was associated with the most disutility and had the most negative impact on preferences for facility-based childbirth.
Conclusion The likelihood of poor facility birth experiences had a significant impact on stated preferences for place of delivery among rural women in northeast Nigeria. The study findings further underline the important relationship between facility birth experience and utilisation. Achieving universal health coverage would require efforts toward addressing poor facility birth experiences and promoting respectful maternity care, to ensure women want to access the services available.
- health services research
- maternal health
- health economics
- health policy
- health systems
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Footnotes
Handling editor Seye Abimbola
Contributors NU, TM, conceptualised and designed the study; NU, conducted the analysis and drafted the manuscript; MMQ, JE, ZH and AS revised the manuscript and provided critically important intellectual content; all authors read and approved the final manuscript.
Funding This work was supported by IDEAS—Informed Decisions for Actions to improve maternal and newborn health (http://ideas.lshtm.ac.uk), which is funded through a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. (Gates Global Health Grant Number: OPP1149259).
Competing interests None declared.
Patient and public involvement Patients and/or the public were involved in the design, or conduct, or reporting, or dissemination plans of this research. Refer to the Methods section for further details.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Ethics approval This research was conducted with approval from the Federal Ministry of Health Abuja, Nigeria, the State Ministry of Health Gombe State, Nigeria and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine (reference 12181). The free and informed consent of all interviewees was obtained.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data availability statement Data are available upon request. The datasets used and/or analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.