Postnatal mothers’ perceptions on respectful maternity care at Kitale County Referral Hospital, Kenya

Background: Respectful maternity care is any deliberate care offered to pregnant mothers that ensures mothers privacy, informed choice and dignity are provided to them without being discriminated, neglected, physically harmed and detained in health facilities. The experiences pregnant mothers will have during pregnancy, labor, birth and postpartum periods whenever they seek care in health facilities forms a key basis of the quality of maternity. This will have an effect on mothers’ health seeking behavior. Objective: To explore postnatal mothers’ perceptions on respectful maternity care at Kitale county referral hospital. Methods: Mixed method design was used to collect data from postnatal mothers with both quantitative and qualitative approaches applied; in quantitative, a pre-tested questionnaire was used among 260 mothers whereas qualitative strategy utilized focused group discussions. Four focused group discussions were carried out with a total of 26 participants. Seven themes were under study that is; non-harm care, privacy, dignity, consensual care, companions, pain-relief and birthing positions. Analysis of quantitative data was done using SPSS version 25.0. Qualitative data was analyzed thematically. Results: A total of 71.5% mothers were offered privacy in labor, 58.1% received consensual care whereas 55.4% received pain relief and comfort. Moreover, majority of mothers were only aware of giving birth in lithotomy position. Besides, they were not comfortable to have companions in delivery rooms during birth. Conclusions: Privacy, dignity and comfort/pain relief in labor was low. This was due to high volume turnover of pregnant mothers seeking care versus the small number of health providers in the maternity unit, limited resources and limited infrastructure within the maternity unit.