Respectful Maternity Care: Knowledge, Attitude and Practice of health care workers and maternal perception about respectful maternity care (RMC) - A Scoping Review

Abstract

Background: Respectful maternity care is the fundamental right of the mother. RMC is recommended by the World Health Organization and refers to care that maintains dignity, privacy, confidentiality and ensures freedom from harm and mistreatment. It enables informed choice and continuous support during labour and childbirth [1]. It has been found that mothers perceived overall dimensions of RMC still some component such as disrespect and abuse is prevalent. Purpose: It has been shown in some study results that maternity care perceived lack respect and dignity and there is gap in knowledge and practice among health workers in implementing respectful maternity care. Therefore, A Scoping review is done to have an outline necessary for a researcher to properly understand the work to be done in dimension RMC. Methods: Various qualitative and quantitative studies are included in Scoping review evaluating the women perception regarding RMC and Health worker’s perspective about RMC. PubMed, Google scholar, Research gate, CINAHL and white ribbon respectful maternity care repository portal were used to find out studies already been done in this field of maternity care. Results: Seven studies were included in this Scoping review. These studies were conducted in Punjab, New Delhi, Nigeria, Ghana, Puducherry, Nepal and Iran. Two qualitative studies and rest of the studies were quantitative studies. The main focus of these studies was to assess the perception of women about RMC and Health worker’s perspective about RMC. Findings revealed that still Disrespect and Abuse is perceived by mothers in various forms namely physical abuse-slapping, hitting, pinching, Verbal abuse-shouting on women, passing bad comments, emotional abuse-lack of information, denying preferences and choice of birth position, lack of sensitivity towards client pain and culture, lack of privacy. Moreover, there was a gap of knowledge and practice about RMC among health workers. Conclusion: By reviewing the literature and databases it has been concluded that Majority of study results depicts that mothers admitted in hospitals reported harsh and annoying maternity care behaviour full of Disrespect and abuse and Health workers have moderate level of knowledge about RMC. So, There is a need of rigorous research to implement RMC interventions to fill the gap in knowledge and practice of RMC among Health workers so as to eventually improve the women perception about RMC.