Factors militating against delivery among patients booked in Olabisi Onabanjo University Teaching Hospital, Sagamu

A preliminary review of antenatal and delivery records of Olabisi Onabanjo University Teaching Hospital (OOUTH), Sagamu revealed that only 47.6% of booked pregnant women subsequently delivered there. This observation stimulated a thought to carry out a study to find out the proportion of pregnant patients who booked in OOUTH and subsequently delivered in OOUTH, patients' preferred place of delivery and factors militating against OOUTH delivery.

A cross-sectional study was carried out on pregnant patients booked at OOUTH, Sagamu between December, 2001 and May, 2002 to find out factors militating against delivery at OOUTH. Two hundred and sixty six questionnaires were returned properly filled.

The age range of the pregnant women was 16 to 42 years with a mean age of 31.2 +/- 3.4 years. The parity ranged from 1-5 with a mean of 2.1 +/- 1.1. The preferred place of delivery was private hospital (58.3%), followed by OOUTH (28%). The higher the educational level, the more they tended to hospital delivery; 57% of the pregnant women who had hospital deliveries had tertiary education. While 52.7% of the pregnant women gave miscellaneous reasons such as relocation, being used for experiment, too many students being present, and frequent strikes by hospital workers for not delivering in OOUTH, as much as 16.5% said the time wasting and bad attitude of the hospital staff were responsible for preferring centres other than OOUTH for delivery.

OOUTH like most other teaching/government hospitals need to be more user-friendly to encourage better patronage. There is a need to educate the patients that attend teaching hospital on the essence of establishing teaching hospitals and the importance of training medical students and retraining of doctors in order to maintain a continuity and high standard of medical practice.