Women’s experience of the quality of care in institutional delivery: evidence from a prospective study in rural south India

Introduction In the context of rising institutional births in India the question often raised is the quality of care in increasingly crowded labour wards. The success of a policy that encourages hospital birth depends on improved standards of medical care, and also crucially, an adequate level of service satisfaction on the part of women and their families. Not only does quality of care influence health outcomes, it is also likely to affect the understanding, utilisation, perceptions of interpersonal aspects of care and the content of services. These were the aims of our study.