The importance of ensuring the availability and accessibility of skilled care during pregnancy and childbirth is highly promoted because this would avoid most maternal deaths occurring from preventable birth complications. Unfortunately, the current utilisation of existing maternal health services is very low in Ethiopia. Factors like unavailability of the service, inadequate number of skilled personnel, geographical inaccessibility of facilities and poor quality of care are some of the commonly mentioned reasons.

However, current evidence also shows that the socio- economic status of the woman also affects the utilisation of institutional delivery. Factors like, the age of the mother, the birth order of the child, the educational level of the mother, the income of the mother and place of residence (rural- urban set up) are some of these socio-economic factors. The studies showed that the older the age of the woman, the lower the educational level and rural residence resulted in lower utilisation of health institutions for delivery.

In addition to that, there is no perceived need for the institutional delivery, i.e., women do not know the importance of institutional delivery and thus prefer home delivery because they think that is much less expensive than institutional delivery. The perception of woman that institutional delivery is unfriendly and not in line with their belief, culture and religion is also another factor affecting institutional delivery in Ethiopia.

The 2011 EDHS also shows a similar result. The result of the study shows that rural, uneducated and poor women were less likely to deliver in the health institution. In the same study, women who did not deliver in health facilities were asked for their reasons for not having institutional delivery, a closer look at the reasons suggests that women, in general, were less likely to blame on service costs and accessibility among the major barriers to delivering in a health institution. Strikingly, the vast majority of women with home deliveries saw institutional delivery as "unnecessary" and "not a customary practice".

On the other hand, it is known that women who have used the ANC services previously, or are exposed to mass media like radio and have a previous history of institutional delivery, will prefer to have their deliveries in health institutions with the assistance of a skilled person.

Last modified: Tuesday, 21 March 2017, 4:02 PM