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Role of Maternal and Child Health Care Services on Postpartum Contraceptive Adoption in India
Authors: Priyanka Dixit, Laxmi Kant Dwivedi, and Amrita Gupta
Source: SAGE Open, 7(3); DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/2158244017733515
Topic(s): Antenatal care
Child health
Contraception
Delivery care
Health care utilization
Maternal health
Women's health
Country: Asia
  India
Published: SEP 2017
Abstract: The aim of this article is to examine the impact of maternal and child health care (MCH) service utilization on the timing of initiation and type of contraceptive use in the subsequent months after delivery of the most recent child. The required data were extracted from India’s third round of National Family Health Survey conducted during 2005-2006, which first time provides the 5 years retrospective monthly information about contraceptive history. Overall, 36,115 currently married women who had delivered live birth during 5 years preceding the survey were included in the analysis. Discrete-time complementary log-log multilevel model was applied to examine the impact of MCH service utilization on the timing of initiation and type of contraceptive use in the subsequent months after delivery of the most recent child. Result shows that after controlling the impact of socioeconomic factors, women who visited health center more than twice for antenatal care (ANC; coefficient = 0.28, SE = .02) were more likely to initiate modern contraceptive methods compared with women who had lower number of visits (coefficient = 0.16, SE = .02). Findings also show that compared with ANC visits, postnatal care did not emerge as a significant factor for contraceptive adoption. Study shows that among programmatic factors, all the three selected MCH indicators emerged as significant predictors of early contraceptive adoption. A significant program implication of the findings is that the promotion of more number of ANC visits, institutional delivery, and postnatal care within 2 weeks of delivery services should be regarded as a mechanism to promote postpartum family planning use. Keywords maternal and child health care, postpartum contraceptive, India, National Family Health Survey-III, ANC visits, institutional delivery, postnatal care utilization, reproductive calendar data
Web: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2158244017733515