Delivery and Post Delivery Complications and their health seeking behavior in West Bengal, India

In most of the developing countries especially in case of India delivery leads large proportion of maternal mortality and morbidity. The area taken into consideration for this study is West Bengal, India. The paper is based on DLHS data round three conducted in the year 2007-08. The aims of this paper are to examine the level of delivery and post-delivery complications among currently married women and also to analyse treatment seeking behaviour of these women. The result indicates that large number of women in West Bengal suffers from complications. Almost half of the women deliver their child at home without been attended by trained workers. It has been realised that the level of care required for the women during their delivery is not provided. While stating the reason behind not availing the institution for delivery, it appeared that 40 percent did not find that as necessary and 31 percent did not get time to go. The importance of mass awareness campaign regarding safe and institutional delivery is recognised. The quality of services in government hospital should be improved. It is recommended that in order to have a safe home delivery, there should be sufficient trained workers who can conduct delivery in a hygienic manner and refer to a hospital during emergency in the case of complication.