Seminar no. 1345
3 September 2025 Time: 12:30 – 13:30 hrs.
Speaker: Sujan Karki (IPSR PhD Candidate, Mahidol University)
The continuum of care (CoC) for maternal health is accessing care during pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum. Wealth status is the major factor for inequalities in the utilization of health services in Nepal. The study aims to examine the use of maternal health services along the continuum of care among Nepali women and also explore the inequalities for the utilization of a continuum of care for maternal healthcare services in Nepal. Completing all three components of maternal health is the full continuum of care for this study. The continuum of care in this study covers that the woman received at least four ANC visits, delivery assisted by skilled birth attendants (SBA), and any PNC visit. The study used all six rounds of survey data from 1996 to 2022, Nepal Demographic and Health Surveys (NDHS). The 18,771 women with the last live births three years preceding the survey were pulled into the single dataset. The result showed the complete continuum of care was 3.7% in 1996 and 58.3% in 2022. Similarly, 81.3% of women did not receive any maternal healthcare services in 1996, and 6.9% in 2022. The bivariate analysis shows that CoC is significantly associated with wealth quintile and the caste group. The multinomial regression analysis shows that completion of continuum care is highly significant in middle, richer, and richest women than in the poorest women. Similarly, specific cast groups have lower odds of completion of CoC. The concentration index shows significant inequalities in the utilization of the continuum of care in all rounds of surveys; the highest inequality was in 2001(0.68), and the lowest was in 2022(0.12). The findings from the study conclude that though the utilization rate of the continuum of care is increasing in trend, some women still do not have access to maternal healthcare services. There was a significant gap in receiving maternal healthcare services in women of different wealth quintiles and caste groups. Inequality significantly persists in maternal healthcare services in Nepal.
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Meeting ID: 967 0714 6766
Passcode: 151879
