The quality of interaction between patients and their carers may impact on a variety of aspects of patient well being. Communication in maternity care between health professionals and women has received much attention at official and professional levels in recent years. There have, however, been few evaluations of the effects of strategies to improve communication between women and their carers...

BACKGROUND Client satisfaction is an important indicator for assessment of the quality of care provided. Detecting patients dissatisfaction and trying to find the most effective and costly services is the basic way for improvement of service quality. The purpose of this study was to determine the satisfaction level of women in the maternity care centers (hospitals) of Lorestan University of Med...

Fear of childbirth has gained importance in the context of increasing medicalization of childbirth. Belgian and Dutch societies are very similar but differ with regard to the organization of maternity care. The Dutch have a high percentage of home births and low medical intervention rates. In contrast, home births in Belgium are rarer, and the medical model is more widely used. By comparing the...

A functioning referral system is generally considered to be a necessary element of successful Safe Motherhood programmes. This paper draws on a scoping review of available literature to identify key requisites for successful maternity referral systems in developing countries, to highlight knowledge gaps, and to suggest items for a future research agenda. Key online social science, medical and h...

BACKGROUND Continuity in the context of healthcare refers to the perception of the client that care has been connected and coherent over time. For over a decade professionals providing maternity and child and family health (CFH) services in Australia and internationally have emphasised the importance of continuity of care for women, families and children. However, continuity across maternity an...

While the value of ethnography in health research is recognized, extent to which it used unclear. The aim this review was map use maternity care, and identify key principles ethnographies were or reported. We systematically searched literature over a 10-year period. Following exclusions we analyzed 39 studies. Results showed level detail between studies varied greatly, highlighting inconsistenc...

BACKGROUND Muslim women are one sub-population in Ghana among whom the rate of skilled maternal health services accessibility and utilisation is very low. However, there are no studies in Ghana that explore the maternity needs and care experiences of Muslim women, and why they do not utilise maternal healthcare services at health facilities. The purpose of this paper is to explore the maternity...