An Assessment of Maternal Health Issues in Two Villages in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa

Amanda Siruma, Diana Hornby and Sunitha Srinivas
Additional contact information
Amanda Siruma: Division of Pharmacy Practice, Faculty of Pharmacy, Rhodes University, Grahamstown 6140, South Africa
Diana Hornby: Community Engagement Office, Rhodes University, Grahamstown 6140, South Africa
Sunitha Srinivas: Division of Pharmacy Practice, Faculty of Pharmacy, Rhodes University, Grahamstown 6140, South Africa

IJERPH, 2014, vol. 11, issue 9, 1-14

Abstract: The fifth Millennium Development Goal of improving maternal health was placed on the international agenda and endorsed by global leaders at the Millennium Summit held in 2000. The aim of this baseline study was to conduct a situational analysis of key maternal health issues in two rural Eastern Cape villages in South Africa: Glenmore and Ndwayana. Ten focus group discussions were conducted with village leaders, community health workers and three different women self-help groups from Glenmore and Ndwayana, with five to eight voluntary participants in each focus group discussion. One of the themes highlighted was inadequate service delivery of ambulance services, which frequently failed to timeously reach expectant mothers in urgent need of transportation to a referral hospital. Adolescent pregnancy was highlighted as the maternal health issue of most concern to the community participants. In this context, a consensus was reached to design and implement an educational intervention to address adolescent pregnancy, which will form the focus of the next phase of this project.

Keywords: maternal health; South Africa; service delivery; antenatal care; adolescent pregnancy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/11/9/9871/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/11/9/9871/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:11:y:2014:i:9:p:9871-9884:d:40492

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().