Taking a Pulse on Community Participation in Maternal Health through Community Clinics in Bangladesh

Goutom Banik, Tapas Mazumder, Abu Bakkar Siddique, Azim Uddin A.F.m, Shams El Arifeen, Janet Perkins and Ahmed Ehsanur Rahman ()
Additional contact information
Goutom Banik: Save the Children, Dhaka 1212, Bangladesh
Tapas Mazumder: Health Research Institute, Faculty of Health, University of Canberra, Canberra, ACT 2617, Australia
Abu Bakkar Siddique: Maternal and Child Health Division, International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b), Mohakhali, Dhaka 1212, Bangladesh
Azim Uddin A.F.m: Maternal and Child Health Division, International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b), Mohakhali, Dhaka 1212, Bangladesh
Shams El Arifeen: Maternal and Child Health Division, International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b), Mohakhali, Dhaka 1212, Bangladesh
Janet Perkins: Department of Social Anthropology, School of Social & Political Science, University of Edinburgh, 15a George Square, Edinburgh EH8 9LD, Scotland, UK
Ahmed Ehsanur Rahman: Maternal and Child Health Division, International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, Bangladesh (icddr,b), Mohakhali, Dhaka 1212, Bangladesh

IJERPH, 2023, vol. 20, issue 3, 1-17

Abstract: Bangladesh started institutionalising community participation by setting-up community clinics (CCs) during the mid-90 s. This paper presents the genealogy of CCs, the community participation mechanism embedded within CCs, and the case of 54 CCs in Brahmanbaria, through the lens of maternal health. We undertook a desk review to understand the journey of CCs. In 2018, we assessed the accessibility, readiness and functionality of CCs, and a household survey to know recently delivered women’s perceptions of CC’s community groups (CGs) and community support groups (CSGs). We performed multiple logistic regression to determine the association between the functionality of these groups and women’s perception regarding these groups’ activities on maternal health. The integration of community participation involving CCs started to roll out through the operationalisation of the Health and Population Sector Programme 1998–2003. In 2019, 13,907 CCs were operational. However, per our CC assessment, their accessibility and readiness were moderate but there were gaps in the functionality of the CCs. The perception of women regarding these groups’ functionality was significantly better when the group members met regularly. The gaps in CCs are primarily induced by the shortcomings of its community participation model. Proper understanding is needed to address this problem which has many facets and layers, including political priorities, expectations, and provisions at a local level.

Keywords: community participation; community clinics; functionality; community group; community support group; maternal health (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/3/2271/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/20/3/2271/ (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:20:y:2023:i:3:p:2271-:d:1048260

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 ().