| Summary: | Plain English Summary Maternal and child health has become a priority area of focus among health policy makers and planners. Several interventions are being tried in an effort to increase deliveries in health facilities in order to realise better health outcomes. This study focused on how incentives for mothers, health workers and boda–boda riders can improve the community-based referral process and deliveries in the rural community of Busoga region in Uganda. Two groups of boda–boda riders, mothers and health workers were followed up. One group was given incentives while the other was not. The incentives included training and training allowances, refreshments during training, payment of transport fares by mothers to boda–boda riders, free telephone calls and provision of bonus airtime to all registered CUG participants and rewards to best performers. The results of this study showed that incentives help to boost deliveries from health facilities hence improving maternal outcomes. In intervention group, 70.5% of mothers who deliveries from health facilities were transported by boda–boda riders whereas this was only 51.2% in the control group. The response time of boda–boda risers to calls for transport by expecting mothers improved tremendously in the intervention group when compared to the control group. All the targeted parties—boda–boda riders, mothers, midwives and Village Health Teams were more active and motivated to work towards improving maternal health of the mothers.
|
|---|