Pregnancy Complications and Birth Outcome: Do Health Care Services Make a Difference?

Abstract

Complications of pregnancy are generally the symptoms and problems that are related to pregnancy and child birth. Many women face some minor health problems while some women who unfortunately get faced with more serious complications during pregnancy. The paper attempts to study the effect of pregnancy complications on birth outcomes and its association with utilization of maternal health care services using third round of District level household and facility survey data (DLHS-3). Multivariate and factor analysis has performed to see the interrelationship between complications in terms of their common underlying dimensions like reproductive health complications. Finding shows that, more than half of the studied women were suffering from any type of complications during pregnancy and were inthe younger age cohort and those were residing in rural areas. It also shows a relationship of pregnancy complications on adverse birth outcome. It has found from the study that women with any pregnancy complications had a more chances of delivering still birth compared to women without any complication. Women having complications like paleness/giddiness and swelling of hands and feet during pregnancy, reportedmore of delivered still births. Near about 59 percent of women gone for full ANC check-ups (three ANC visit, TT injection and IFA tablets/syrup). Result shows that having any complication during pregnancy couldalso lead tocomplications at deliverysuch as labour related complications. Difference has found among Maternal Health Care service receivers and non-receiverson birth outcome. Prevalence of delivered still-birth has found higher among non-receivers compared to service receivers. Therefore, it needs a greater attention to improve health care services and awareness among common people and also requires the proper monitoring, both during and after pregnancy, in order to improve maternal and foetal outcomes by providing good health care services.