CONTEXT In Mexico, family planning advice has been incorporated into the clinical guidelines for prenatal care. However, the relationship between women's receipt of family planning advice during prenatal care and subsequent contraceptive use has not been evaluated. METHODS Data were collected in 2003 and 2004 in 17 Mexican states from 2,238 urban low-income women postpartum. Participating wom...

In April 2008, specialization in gynecology and obstetrics departments was introduced in the Sennan area of Osaka prefecture in Japan that aimed at solving the problems of regional provisions of obstetrics services (e.g., shortage of obstetricians, overworking of obstetricians, and provision of specialist maternity services for high-risk pregnancies). Under this specialization, the gynecology a...

OBJECTIVE To define the prenatal care utilization pattern in Bornova and determine the factors affecting the amount and content of prenatal care. DESIGN Follow-up study. SETTING Bornova is an urban district in western Turkey. STUDY PARTICIPANTS Two hundred and forty-five pregnant women registered with primary care settings in Bornova during the year 2000. Response rate was 83.7%. Main out...

BACKGROUND Taiwan's National Health Insurance (NHI), implemented in 1995, substantially increased the number of health care facilities that can deliver free prenatal care. Because of the increase in such facilities, it is usually assumed that women would have more choices regarding prenatal care facilities and thus experience reduction in travel cost. Nevertheless, there has been no research ex...

OBJECTIVE To assess maternal and neonatal health services in 49 developing countries. METHODS The services were rated on a scale of 0 to 100 by 10 - 25 experts in each country. The ratings covered emergency and routine services, including family planning, at health centres and district hospitals, access to these services for both rural and urban women, the likelihood that women would receive ...

BACKGROUND Coverage assessment of prevention of Pregnant Mother to Child Transmission (PMTCT) of HIV service is useful to measure the health system effort or performance of health service delivery function and to influence decisions. The objective of this study was to assess effective coverage level for prevention of Pregnant Mother to Child Transmission services in Jimma University Hospital. ...

This research investigated the association between the household status of women and their use of maternal health services in rural Egypt. Face-to-face interviews with a structured questionnaire to 201 married women were carried out in a village, posing questions about their health service utilization and their household socio-economic status. The association between service utilization and oth...

BACKGROUND Use of maternal health services is an effective means for reducing the risk of maternal morbidity and mortality, especially in places where the general health status of women is poor. This study was guided by the following objectives: 1) To determine the relationship between timing of first antenatal care (ANC) visit and type of delivery assistance 2) To establish the determinants of...

OBJECTIVE The Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) are a vital data resource for cross-country comparative analyses. This study is part of a set of analyses assessing the types of providers being used for reproductive and maternal health care across 57 countries. Here, we examine some of the challenges encountered using DHS data for this purpose, present the provider classification we used, and...

The study investigated individual and household factors associated with non-use of maternal health services in Botswana. Nationally-representative data, drawn from the 1996 Botswana Family Health Survey, were used. A weighted sample of 19,031 women, aged 15-49 years, who had at least one pregnancy history in the five years prior to the survey was considered for analysis. Both simple cross-tabul...