Factors influencing the use of maternal healthcare services and childhood immunization in Swaziland

International Journal for Equity in Health

Research

Lesego Ralesego¹  Cassandra Nyathi¹  Mluleki Tsawe²  A Sathiya Susuman²  Amos Moto³  Thendo Netshivhera⁴ 

[1] Department of Demography & Population Studies, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa;Department of Statistics & Population Studies, University of the Western Cape, Cape Town, South Africa;Population Statistics Division, Statistics South Africa (StatsSA), Pretoria, South Africa;Population Unit, North West University, Mafikeng, South Africa;

关键词: Maternal healthcare;    Antenatal care;    Delivery care;    Postnatal care;    Child health;    Immunization;    Socio-demographic factors;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12939-015-0162-2

 received in 2014-05-28, accepted in 2015-03-17,  发布年份 2015

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundMaternal and child healthcare services are very important for the health outcomes of the mother and that of the child and in ensuring that both maternal and child deaths are prevented. Studying these services is necessary in developing countries where infrastructure (which is meant to deal with these health services) is minimal or lacking. The objective of the study is to examine the factors that influence the use of maternal healthcare services and childhood immunization in Swaziland.MethodsOur study used secondary data from the Swaziland Demographic and Health Survey 2006–07. This is an explorative and descriptive study which used pre-selected variables to study factors influencing the use of maternal and child healthcare services in Swaziland. We ran three different types of analyses: univariate, bivariate and multivariate. For the multivariate analysis, a logistic regression was run to investigate the relationship between the dependent and independent variables.FindingsThe study findings showed a high use rate of antenatal care (97.3%) and delivery care (74.0%) and a low rate of postnatal care use (20.5%). The uptake of childhood immunization is also high in the country, averaging more than 80.0%. Certain factors which were found to be influencing the use of maternal healthcare and childhood immunization include: woman’s age, parity, media exposure, maternal education, wealth quintile, and residence. The findings also revealed that these factors affect the use of maternal and child health services differently.ConclusionIt is important to study factors related to maternal and child health uptake to inform relevant stakeholders about possible areas of improvement. Programs to educate families about the importance of maternal and child healthcare services should be implemented. In addition, interventions should focus on: (a) age differentials in use of maternal and child health services, (b) women with higher parities, (c) women in rural areas, and (d) women from the poor quintile. We recommend that possible future studies could use the qualitative approach to study issues associated with the low use of postnatal services.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Tsawe et al.; licensee BioMed Central. 2015. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.