Women's Satisfaction with Maternal care in Ghana : The Doctor's Behaviour as a Regulating Factor

Abstract

<p>The key element of human rights and the road to equity and dignity of women and children is the quality of care received. The provision of maternal health care is based on quality during pregnancy, and distinctly forty-eight hours after delivery, is an important contribution to saving women’s lives and preventing disabilities (Quah, 2016). Thus, the understanding of women's experiences and expectations through the continuum of prenatal care, delivery care and postnatal care is important for assessing the quality of maternal health care and the determination of problem areas requiring improvement. Women's satisfaction reflects women's judgment of various aspects of maternal health care, including organizational and interpersonal aspects. Multiple linear regression was used (IBM SPSS v.25) to test the main hypotheses for the present study. The ordinal regression was used to predict the value of a result variable (dependent variable) based on the value of two or more prediction variables (independent variables). This study identifies the relationship between maternal health services (prenatal & diagnostic care, delivery care and postnatal care) and women's satisfaction with the moderating role of doctor's behavior. The study finally determined the positive impact of health care services on women's satisfaction. The results also show that the doctor's behavior in health care services affect women's satisfaction and so, the alternate hypotheses are accepted. In this study, physicians were encouraged to give pregnant women thorough inspection and examination, treat them with courtesy and respect. The study also showed that, the government should focus on hiring additional employees to overcome workload.</p>