Do experiences with pregnancy, birth and postnatal care in Norway vary by the women’s geographic origin? a comparison of cross-sectional survey results

BACKGROUND: A national survey was conducted to measure and benchmark women’s experiences with pregnancy, birth and postnatal care in Norway. The purpose of this secondary analysis is to explore potential variation in these experiences with regard to the survey respondents’ geographic origin. METHODS: Data were collected in a national observational cross-sectional study, by a self-administered questionnaire and from registries. The questionnaire collects patient reported experience measures (PREMS) of mainly nontechnical aspects of the health-care services. While taking the clustered characteristics of the respondents into consideration, we compared the mean scores on 16 indexes between women of four different geographic origins using linear regression models. RESULTS: The origin of the 4904 respondents were classified as Norway (n = 4028, 82%), Western Europe, North-America, Oceania (n = 233, 5%), Eastern Europe (n = 290, 6%), and Asia, Turkey, Africa, and South-America) (n = 353, 7%). The observed differences were moderate, and no consistency was present in the results in respect of direction or magnitude of the differences between the groups. CONCLUSIONS: With some important cautions, we conclude that this study did not detect systematic differences between groups of different geographic origin, in their experiences with pregnancy and maternity care in Norway.