Costs of maternal health care services in three anglophone African countries

Abstract

This paper is a synthesis of a case study of provider and consumer costs, along with selected quality indicators, for six maternal health services provided at one public hospital, one mission hospital, one public health centre and one mission centre, in Uganda, Malawi and Ghana. The study examines the costs of providing the services in a selected number of facilities in order to examine the reasons behind cost differences, assess the efficiency of service delivery, and determine whether management improvements might achieve cost savings without hurting quality. This assessment is important to African countries with ambitious goals for improving maternal health but scarce public health resources and limited government budgets. The study also evaluates the costs that consumers pay to use the maternal health services, along with the contribution that revenues from fees for services make to recovering health facility costs.