BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES High maternity-related health care spending is often cited as an important barrier in utilizing quality health care during pregnancy and childbirth. This study has two objectives: (i) to measure the levels of expenditure on total maternity care in disaggregated components such as ANCs, PNCs, and Natal care expenditure; (ii) to quantify the extent of catastrophic matern...

BACKGROUND The number of maternity units has declined in France, raising concerns about the possible impact of increasing travel distances on perinatal health outcomes. We investigated impact of distance to closest maternity unit on perinatal mortality. METHODS Data from the French National Vital Statistics Registry were used to construct foetal and neonatal mortality rates over 2001-08 by di...

Inadequate access to maternity care services is increasingly a problem in Canada owing to health human resource shortages among obstetricians, family doctors, midwives, and nurses who participate in maternity care teams.1 The issue is particularly troublesome for pregnant women residing in rural and remote areas who often have to travel to receive integrated and safe maternity care.2 Considerin...

conclusions the quality gap in the services provided by maternity units showed that these units are not able to meet pregnant women’s expectations completely. the negative quality gaps can be used as a guideline to improve the maternal health care quality and reduce maternal mortality, particularly in high-risk women such as those living in rural areas. results there was a negative gap in all d...

The components of this toolkit can be used by clinicians who are providing maternity care, trainers or educators of clinicians who will be providing maternity care, supervisors of clinicians who provide maternity care, program managers who develop and manage programs with a maternity care component, and by policy makers or other key stakeholders who want to promote RMC in the programs for which...

BACKGROUND A lack of standard terminology or means to identify and define models of maternity care in Australia has prevented accurate evaluations of outcomes for mothers and babies in different models of maternity care. OBJECTIVE As part of the Commonwealth-funded National Maternity Data Development Project, a classification system was developed utilising a data set specification that define...