Mothers' satisfaction with referral hospital delivery service in Amhara Region, Ethiopia

A hospital-based cross-sectional survey that involved an exit interview was conducted from September to November 2009 in three referral hospitals in Ethiopia. A total of 417 delivering mothers were enrolled in the study. Client satisfaction was measured using a survey instrument adopted from the Donabedian quality assessment framework. We collect data systematically from every other postnatal woman who delivered in the referral hospitals. Multivariate and binary logistic regression was applied to identify the relative effect of each explanatory variable on the outcome (satisfaction).The proportion of mothers who were satisfied with delivery care in this study was 61.9%. Women's satisfaction with delivery care was associated with wanted status of the pregnancy, immediate maternal condition after delivery, waiting time to see the health worker, availability of waiting area, care providers' measure taken to assure privacy during examinations, and amount of cost paid for service.The overall satisfaction of hospital delivery services in this study is found to be suboptimal. The study strongly suggests that more could be done to assure that services provided are more patient centered.One of the Millennium Development Goals (MDG5) is to reduce the maternal mortality ratio by 3/4 between 1990 and 2015. Pregnancy and childbirth claim the lives of an estimated half a million of women globally each year [1]. More than half of these deaths occur in Africa [1]. Ethiopia is one of the countries that have highest maternal mortality rates (MMR) in the world which is estimated to be 673/100,000 live births [2]. Part of this mortality is attributed to poor delivery care [3].The Ethiopian government and international organizations are working for making hospital delivery services accessible and usable for all pregnant women but still the proportion of births attended by a skilled birth attendant is about 18.4% [4] in 2009 which was much lower than the average level in developing count