A review of the quality of midwifery care in Iran

Abstract

Introduction: About half a million women worldwide die annually from complications of pregnancy or lack of midwifery care, 99% of which occur in developing countries. High-quality service often leads to customer satisfaction. Staff play a significant role in improving the quality of care. Given the importance of this issue in improving macroeconomic and international indicators, we decided to review the quality of midwifery care in Iran. Materials and Methods: After searching 950 articles with these keywords: quality, care, midwifery and satisfaction in the search engines of Sciencedirect, Iranmedex, SID, Magiran, Google Scholar, Pubmed and IranDoc, about 28 articles were finally selected and the results were filmed. Results: Studies reported the quality of prenatal care, pregnancy, postpartum and family planning at a moderate level, so that the weakest quality was observed in the fourth stage of labor. Satisfaction of pre-natal services, labor and childbirth, post-partum and family planning was stated at a high and very high level, and the satisfaction with the pre-natal period was higher than the labor. Conclusion: The quality of midwifery care was at a moderate level and its satisfaction was high. Therefore, high satisfaction does not always mean high quality of service, as mothers' satisfaction may be due to their low expectation. Therefore, in order to evaluate the quality of midwifery services, in addition to obtaining satisfaction, international standards must always be considered.