Mobile App for Rating Health Care Facilities and to Report on Respectful Maternity Care in Public Sector Hospitals: A Pilot Study

Over the past two decades there has been a substantial reduction in maternal mortality World over due to various strategies adopted to reduce the same. One of the strategies was institutionalizing child birth and at present in India 85% of the births takes place in medical settings. This has led to overcrowding of health care facilities and disrespect and abuse (D&A) surfaced, making it necessary to preserve Respectful maternity care (RMC) which has become one of the integral part of maternal and child health programmes. The standards as categorised by Browser and Hill (2010) are cumbersome and require long hours to collect data to assess RMC. There is a need for simple methods of knowing D&A so that measures can be taken to correct and eliminate the same. We developed a simple App for assessing quality of health care facilities and reporting D&A and did a study to pilot test the App involving postpartum women and Birth companions. Overall the prevalence of D&A was 47% and the most common type was non-dignified care.