Non-certified providers provide initial care in Bangladesh

For the study, researchers collected data using the pregnancy surveillance infrastructure from the JiVitA-3 community trial in northwest rural Bangladesh. The Johns Hopkins researchers conducted 40 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with women reporting severe acute obstetric complications to document barriers to timely receipt of medical care. Although the women surveyed recognized the severity of their complications, this recognition did not translate to prompt seeking of medical care. According to the study, women attributed delays in seeking medical care to the reluctance of their husbands and other decision makers to seek prompt care. They also complained of the tremendous pain endured before their male relatives decided it was necessary to seek medical care. When families did decide to seek care, women first visited non-certified treatment providers, citing established relationships, lower cost of treatment compared to certified providers, and close proximity as reasons for this choice.

“Interventions to improve timely seeking of medical care for obstetric complications may need to more effectively and appropriately target husbands and family members with messaging on care seeking,” said Alain Labrique, PhD, assistant professor in the Bloomberg School’s Department of International Health and corresponding author of this study. “The use of mobile phones holds potential for decreasing delays to receiving hospital care by increasing access to information and facilitating coordination of finances and logistics for emergency medical care.”

“Accounts of Severe Acute Obstetric Complications in Rural Bangladesh” was written by Shegufta S Sikder, Alain Labrique, Barkat Ullah, Hasmot Ali, Mahbubur Rashid, Sucheta Mehra, Nusrat Jahan, Abu A Shamim, Keith P West and Parul Christian.

Financial support for the research was provided by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to the Center for Human Nutrition in the Department of International Health at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Provided by Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health