Study On The Factors Associated With Maternal Health Services Utilization

BackgroundA good maternal care can improve maternal and child health, significantly reducing maternal mortality and infant mortality. Although maternal health care has been made considerable development in our country, but there are still various problems, which restricts the use of maternal health care services. And Women of childbearing age vary a lot in their utilization of maternal health services.Social Ecosystem Theory is used to examine the theory of interaction between human behavior and social environment, emphasis on the importance of ecological environment (system) of human existence to analyze and understand people’s behavior. According to the theory, the micro, mezzo and macro system of people’s living environment will always be interaction. From the perspective of social ecosystem theory, it will be hypothesized that the influence factors of the maternal women’s maternal health care utilization would be from their individual, family, social environment and the interaction factors. From the perspective of social ecosystem, this study will explore the influence factors of maternal health services utilization in the micro, mezzo and macro levels.AimBased on the perspective of Social Ecosystem Theory, the aim of this study is to explore the influence factors of maternal health services utilization from three aspects: individual, family and society.MethodsThe literature research was used to collect a number of relevant official documents about the social-economic and health-care development data and to study the subject systematically.The investigations were adopted as well, which included two parts:one was the rural health services survey in Zhejiang province; the other was the maternal health services survey conducted in Jiangsu province. ResultsMaternal health care services utilization was impacted by a variety of social factors from multiple levels of maternal women’s individuals, families, social environment. It is notable that, with the implementation of some health financing reform, such as the new rural cooperative medical scheme (NCMS), maternal health care level was effectively improved, and the gap between urban and rural was narrowing. But the absence of maternal health services of floating population brought new pressure on urban maternal health care. In the aspect of social policy, the family planning policy led to absence or deficiency of maternal care uses among a part of out-of-planning deliveries.ConclusionIn continue to push forward the NCMS, combined with the compensation of maternal care content, the design of the compensation scheme of NCMS should be further adjusted and proved to make it work in reducing the economic burden of rural maternal care. More active measures should be taken to improve maternal health uses of the floating population. Under the background of national policy of family planning, enough attention should be drown to the phenomenon that people with out-of-planning births become a special group of "bottleneck" of maternal health services utilization, especially in some economically developed areas.