Understanding rural women's preferences for telephone call engagement with primary health care providers in Nigeria: a discrete choice experiment.

BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the use of mobile phones to provide primary health care services and maintain continuity of care. This study aims to understand rural women's preferences for telephone call engagement with primary health care providers in Nigeria. METHODS: A discrete choice experiment was conducted alongside an action research project that empowered primary health care workers to develop and implement a telephone call intervention to assess and enhance experiences with facility childbirth care. Between January and March 2022, 30 providers from 10 primary health care facilities implemented the choice experiment among rural women who had institutional childbirth to elicit service user preferences for telephone call engagement. The women were asked to express their preferred scenario for telephone call engagement with their primary health care providers. Generalised linear mixed models were used to estimate women's preferences. RESULTS: Data for 460 women were available for the discrete choice experiment. The study showed that rural women have preferences for telephone call engagement with primary health care providers. Specifically, women preferred engaging with female to male callers (ß=1.665 (95% CI 1.41, 1.93), SE=0.13, p<0.001), preferred call duration under 15 min (ß=1.287 (95% CI 0.61, 1.96), SE=0.34, p<0.001) and preferred being notified before the telephone engagement (warm calling) (ß=1.828 (95% CI 1.10, 2.56), SE=0.37, p<0.001). Phone credit incentive was also a statistically significant predictor of women's preferences for engagement. However, neither the availability of scheduling options, the period of the day or the day of the week predicts women's preferences. CONCLUSIONS: The study highlights the importance of understanding rural women's preferences for telephone call engagement with healthcare providers in low-income and middle-income countries. These findings can inform the development of mobile phone-based interventions and improve acceptability and broader adoption.

Women's perceptions of telephone interviews about their experiences with childbirth care in Nigeria: A qualitative study.

Our objective is to investigate women's perceptions of phone interviews about their experiences with facility childbirth care. The study was conducted between October 2020 and January 2021, in Gombe State, Nigeria. Participants were women aged 15-49 years, who delivered in ten study Primary Health Care centres, provided phone numbers, and consented to a follow-up telephone interview about their childbirth experience. The phone interviews took place 14 months after the delivery and consisted of a quantitative survey about women's experiences of facility childbirth followed by a set of structured qualitative questions about their experiences with the phone survey. Three months later 20 women were selected, based on their demographic characteristics, for a further in-depth qualitative phone interview to explore the answers to the structured qualitative questions in more depth. The qualitative interviews were analysed using a thematic approach. We found that most of the women appreciated being called to discuss their childbirth experiences as it made them feel privileged and valued, they were motivated to participate as they viewed the topic as relevant and thought that their interview could lead to improvements in care. They found the interview procedures easy and perceived that the call offered privacy. Poor network connectivity and not owning the phone they were using presented challenges to some women. Women felt more able to re-arrange interview times on the phone compared to a face-to-face interview, they valued the increased autonomy as they were often busy with household chores and could rearrange to a more convenient time. Views about interviewer gender diverged, but most participants preferred a female interviewer. The preferred interview length was a maximum of 30 minutes, though some women said duration was irrelevant if the subject of discussion was important. In conclusion, women had positive views about phone interviews on experiences with facility childbirth care.

To call or not to call: exploring the validity of telephone interviews to derive maternal self-reports of experiences with facility childbirth care in northern Nigeria.

BACKGROUND: To institutionalise respectful maternity care, frequent data on the experience of childbirth care is needed by health facility staff and managers. Telephone interviews have been proposed as a low-cost alternative to derive timely and actionable maternal self-reports of experience of care. However, evidence on the validity of telephone interviews for this purpose is limited. METHODS: Eight indicators of positive maternity care experience and 18 indicators of negative maternity care experience were investigated. We compared the responses from exit interviews with women about their childbirth care experience (reference standard) to follow-up telephone interviews with the same women 14 months after childbirth. We calculated individual-level validity metrics including, agreement, sensitivity, specificity, area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC). We compared the characteristics of women included in the telephone follow-up interviews to those from the exit interviews. RESULTS: Demographic characteristics were similar between the original exit interview group (n=388) and those subsequently reached for telephone interview (n=294). Seven of the eight positive maternity care experience indicators had reported prevalence higher than 50% at both exit and telephone interviews. For these indicators, agreement between the exit and the telephone interviews ranged between 50% and 92%; seven positive indicators met the criteria for validation analysis, but all had an AUC below 0.6. Reported prevalence for 15 of the 18 negative maternity care experience indicators was lower than 5% at exit and telephone interviews. For these 15 indicators, agreement between exit and telephone interview was high at over 80%. Just three negative indicators met the criteria for validation analysis, and all had an AUC below 0.6. CONCLUSIONS: The telephone interviews conducted 14 months after childbirth did not yield results that were consistent with exit interviews conducted at the time of facility discharge. Women's reports of experience of childbirth care may be influenced by the location of reporting or changes in the recall of experiences of care over time.