Quality of services in BBMP Maternity homes – An assessment

Each year, nearly 50 thousand antenatal cases are examined in these maternity homes alone. Approximately 50 percent of these mothers deliver in the Government maternity homes; stakeholder consultations and media reports in the past have significantly highlighted poor service delivery and alarming levels of corruption in the maternity homes. Various groups working for the poor in the city had expressed a strong demand to carry out a user feedback survey to empirically assess the quality of care particularly that of the service delivery process at the maternity homes. As a response to this, Public Affairs Centre undertook a unique Citizen Report Card survey of maternity homes, India Population Project Centres (IPP) and Urban Family Welfare Centres (UFWC) in partnership with five city based NGOs in 2000. A total of 500 patients and 77 staff of these facilities were interviewed. The purpose of the survey was to get corroborative evidence on the poor quality of services provided, and the widespread corruption in the Maternity Homes to strengthen the advocacy work of Civil Society Organisations.

This study aimed at assessing the current quality of services provided by these maternity homes. An additional component to the study is to understand the constraints from the supply side which is mainly the financial constraints which very often results in poor quality of services. An attempt has been made here, to study the budgets, incomes and expenditures of selected maternity homes to identify gaps if any in terms of flow or utilization of funds and correlate them with the quality of services that are being provided by the Maternity homes.

The report was authored by Meena Nair, Prarthana Rao, K Prabhakar and Poornima G R.