Universal health access will not be achieved unless women
are cared for in their own communities and are empowered to take decisions
about their own health in a supportive environment. This will only be achieved
by community-based demand side interventions for maternal health access. In
this review article, we highlight three common strategies to increase
demand-side barriers to maternal healthcare access and identify the main
challenges that still need to be addressed for these strategies to be
effective.
Discussion
Common demand side strategies can be grouped into three
categories:(i) Financial incentives/subsidies; (ii) Enhancing patient transfer,
and; (iii) Community involvement. The main challenges in assessing the
effectiveness or efficacy of these interventions or strategies are the lack of
quality evidence on their outcome and impact and interventions not integrated
into existing health or community systems. However, what is highlighted in this
review and overlooked in most of the published literature on this topic is the
lack of knowledge about the context in which these strategies are to be
implemented.
Summary
We suggest three challenges that need to be addressed to
create a supportive environment in which these demand-side strategies can
effectively improve access to maternal health services. These include:
addressing decision-making norms, engaging in intergenerational dialogue, and
designing contextually appropriate communication strategies.
This is the abstract of a paper titled:
Strategies to increase demand for maternal health
services in resource-limited settings: challenges to be addressed.
"Article gems" is a new series of posts on
Natasha's health watch, highlighting important research papers. Feel free to
email me if you find interesting articles that could be part of the
series.
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