Background: As maternity services evolve and the population of women served also changes, there is a continuing\nneed to effectively document the views of women with recent experience of care. A womanâ??s maternity experience\ncan have a positive or negative effect upon her emotional well-being and health, in the immediate and the longterm,\nwhich can also impact the infant and the wider family system. Measuring womenâ??s perceptions of maternity\nservices is an important way of monitoring the quality of care provision, as well as providing key indicators to\norganisations of the services that they are providing. It follows that, without information identifying possible areas\nin need of improvement, it is not clear what changes should be made to improve the experiences of women\nduring their journey through maternity services from pregnancy to the early weeks at home with a new baby .\nThe objective is to describe the development process and psychometric properties of a measure of womenâ??s\nexperience of maternity care covering the three distinctly different phases of maternity â?? pregnancy, labour and\nbirth, and the early postnatal period.\nMethods: Data from a national survey of women who had recently given birth (n = 504) were used. Exploratory\nand confirmatory factor analytic methods were employed. The measure was assessed for underlying latent factor\nstructure, as well as for reliability, internal consistency, and validity (predictive, convergent and discriminant).\nResults: The models developed confirmed the use of three separate, but related scales about experience of\nmaternity care during pregnancy, labour and birth and the postnatal period. Data reduction was effective, resulting\nin a measure with 36 items (12 per scale).\nConclusion: The need for a psychometrically robust and qualitatively comprehensive measure of womenâ??s\nexperience of maternity care has been addressed in the development and validation of this prototype\nmeasure. The whole measure can be used at one time point, or the three separate subscales used as\nindividual measures of experience during particular phases of the maternity journey with identified factor\nstructures in their own right.
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