cover image: Why Rural Women Use—or Avoid—Maternal Health Services : Insights from a Qualitative Study in Bolivia

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Why Rural Women Use—or Avoid—Maternal Health Services : Insights from a Qualitative Study in Bolivia

9 Nov 2020

Bolivia has achieved significant improvements in its reproductive health indicators in recent years. Yet the country’s maternal mortality ratio, at 206 per 100,000 women in 2015, was the second highest in the Latin American and Caribbean region after Haiti. Bolivia’s indigenous women are particularly vulnerable to death from complications related to pregnancy, childbirth, and the post-partum period. In the past, there have been no studies that sought the views of health providers and users to understand and address this problem in rural indigenous communities. This study fills that gap by tapping this experiential knowledge in these communities in Bolivia and gain insights into supply- and demand-side barriers that keep women away from institutional maternal health services. Increasing their use of quality maternal care is vital to long-term goals to lower the country’s maternal mortality ratio. Both supply- and demand-side influences restrain the uptake of maternal health services by rural indigenous women. Strengthening the quality of maternal health services, including provider-user interactions, is a first and foremost priority that can be combined with targeted behavior change interventions to reduce community, household, and individual constraints on women seeking maternal health services.
gender maternal health healthcare system health, nutrition and population :: reproductive health health, nutrition and population :: health service management and delivery social protections and labor :: social protections & assistance health, nutrition and population :: health project design and implementation health, nutrition and population :: health and poverty access to health services women's agency

Authors

World Bank

Collection(s)
Other Health Study
Published in
United States of America
Rights
CC BY 3.0 IGO
Rights Holder
World Bank
Rights URI
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/igo
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10986/34778
citation
“World Bank. 2020. Why Rural Women Use—or Avoid—Maternal Health Services : Insights from a Qualitative Study in Bolivia . World Bank, Washington, DC. © World Bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/34778 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”

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