Can Mothers Afford Maternal Health Care Costs? User Costs of Maternity Services in Rural Tanzania
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Following the difficult economic situation various countries introduced health sector reforms, including user charges to finance the system. The assessment of user costs for maternity services in Tanzania was part of a larger study, which covered inputs, outputs and efficiency of services. The study was carried out from October 1997 to January 1998 in Mtwara urban and rural district in South Tanzania. One hundred and seven women attending a quarter of government health facilities were randomly selected and interviewed. Twenty one key informants were also interviewed and service procedures observed. Users of maternity services pay mainly for admission, drugs, other supplies and travel costs. Travel costs represent about half of these financial costs. The average total costs vary between US$11.60 for antenatal consultation and US$135.40 for caesarean section at the hospital. Unofficial payments are not included in the calculation. The amounts vary and payment is irregular. We therefore conclude that time costs are constantly higher than financial costs. High direct payments and the fear of unofficial costs are acute barriers to the use of maternity services. User costs can substantially be reduced by the re-organisation of service delivery especially at antenatal consultation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".