![[ Visit Client Website ]](images/banner.gif)
Postpartum care encompasses management of the mother, newborn, and infant during the postpartum period. This period is critical for the mother and the newborn as mothers experience strong emotions, significant physical changes, new and altered relationships and the assumption of and adjustment to new roles. Mothers’ postpartum care is often neglected in Bangladeshi society. There is hardly any research available and an important knowledge gap exists on a critical issue. This mixed methods research explores the postpartum care seeking behavior among Bangladeshi mothers. It also examines individual-level factors that facilitate or impede the effective use of postpartum mother’s care from the institutional health care providers.
Methods:
Concurrent mixed methods research design was used to collect data from the women who gave birth in one year preceding the study. Using a convenient sampling, both survey (N=200) and semi-structured interviews (N=10) were used to collect the data. All interested participants were screened based on inclusion and exclusion criteria. Eighteen and above years old mothers who had child in less than one year were included. However, if the mothers were emotionally challenged or had a chance to be exposed with serious mental health issues including severe depression at antenatal, delivery or postpartum period were excluded. Participants’ demographics, socio-economic status, their experienced physical, emotional, familial, cultural postpartum health care seeking behavior related challenges and aspirations to cope with those challenges were explored.
Results:
The results show that the utilization of postpartum care is very low among new mothers and age at birth, education, birth order have great influence on the utilization of care services. Only one third of the participants sought care from the qualified doctors in hospitals or clinic. A majority of mothers sought traditional or in-home care, such as using hot water to relief pain or Ayurvedic medicine. However, 97.14% participants opined that they experienced physical problems including loss of appetite after their child birth (92.85%), feeling very weak (12.85%), and had excessive bleeding (54.28%). Emotional suffering was another common experience for the mothers. Eighty nice percent (89.18%) participants felt lonely after giving birth of their child and approximately 59.45% participants were anxious about their newborns’ health. The reasons behind not seeking care was that many participants did not consider care as essential and available for them. Moreover, high cost, lack of transport, lack of quality care, unsupportive family were explained to be the reasons for not seeking care.
Conclusions and Implications:
Postpartum mother care in Bangladesh is relatively new and unexplored area. This research explores the use of care services and reasons for not seeking services. The research is likely to contribute to develop knowledge on the issue. As well, health care providers and policymakers might use this information to develop new service for new mothers.