Women’s multidimensional empowerment index and essential newborn care practice in Bangladesh: The mediating role of skilled antenatal care follow-ups

INTRODUCTION: The World Health Organization recommended a set of five neonatal care practices that are most essential for good health of a newborn. As good essential newborn care (ENC) practice reduces the risk of neonatal morbidity and mortality, this paper focuses how women’s multidimensional empowerment index is associated with this practice through the skilled antenatal care. To the best of knowledge, no such study has been conducted yet. The composite index of women’s multidimensional empowerments was constructed using family decision, intimate partner violence, social status, healthcare access and economic status of women; and skilled antenatal care was defined if a pregnant woman received eight or more checkups during pregnancy from skilled health professionals. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Data extracted from Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey, 2017–18 have been utilized in the study. A total of 2441 mothers have been considered who delivered their last live birth at home within three years preceding the survey. A mediation analysis was performed considering the structural equation modeling to find out the adjusted association of women’s empowerment on both skilled antenatal care and good ENC practice, but the unadjusted associations were also checked using a chi-square test. To test the indirect as well as total effect of women’s empowerment through skilled antenatal care on good ENC practice, bias-corrected standard errors were estimated using a bootstrapping sampling. RESULTS: Good ENC practice was considerably low in Bangladesh with 7.6% of newborns receiving the practice. Both adjusted and unadjusted analyses showed the significant association of women’s empowerment with both skilled antenatal care and good ENC practice. The study revealed that the indirect effect of high empowerment through skilled antenatal care was greater than its direct effect on good ENC practice. CONCLUSION: This study explored that the prevalence of good ENC practice can be accelerated through women’s empowerment, where skilled antenatal care plays an important mediating role in improving good ENC practice among highly empowered mothers. The study suggests that a woman should follow the latest guidelines recommended by WHO for antenatal care follow-up. Policymakers can modify some of the maternal and child health care interventions based on the research findings.