Predictors of Maternal Health Service Utilization

We analyze the predictors of three indicators of use of maternal health services: use of antenatal care, delivery assisted by a trained medical personnel (doctor or nurse/nurse-midwife), and use of postnatal care services. We assess the predictors of each of these indicators separately and with reference to the most recent birth.
We examined the predictive value of a number of individual and household variables, including rank of the most recent birth, education, ethnicity, age at last birth, attitudes towards family planning, ideal family size and socio-economic status. We examined the role of three community level variables: type of place of residence (urban versus rural), media saturation in the local government area (LGA) of residence, and prevalence of the small family norm in the LGA of residence. At the state level, we assessed the role of the ratio of Primary Health Care (PHC) facilities to the population. In addition, we assessed random effects at the state level. We selected these predictors based on information from extant literature and because they were significant predictors in initial bivariate analyses of the data. We describe the various predictors in Table 1.