“I feel like I'm not confident enough”: A qualitative study of Cambodian midwives’ experiences in disability-inclusive maternity care

Objective

Midwives often experience challenges in meeting the maternity care needs of women with disabilities. Understanding context-specific factors influencing their experiences is essential if these challenges are to be addressed. This study aims to explore the experiences of Cambodian midwives regarding the provision of maternity care services for women with disabilities in Cambodia. In so doing, this study seeks to understand the barriers and facilitators that midwives encounter when delivering services to women with disabilities.

Research design

Drawing on the World Health Organization Quality of Care framework, this qualitative study employed a phenomenological design. Purposive sampling was used to recruit fifteen midwives across the diverse geographical settings of Phnom Penh, Kampong Speu and Kampot. Participants engaged in an in-depth semi-structured interview. All interviews were audio recorded, transcribed verbatim, and thematically analysed.

Results

Most participants reported past experiences in which they had provided maternity care to women with disabilities and professed their strong commitment to continue doing so. Key challenges undermining the capabilities, confidence, and therefore commitment of the midwives to providing this care included the lack of evidence-based guidelines and training on caring for women with disabilities, including communication challenges, insufficient mechanisms for identifying women with disabilities and their care needs, and inadequate referral systems and processes to respond to emergencies. These midwives also highlighted challenges they faced in supporting women to link into other key services such as social services, rehabilitation, and mental health services. Midwives were eager to receive more training and resources to strengthen their capacity to adequately meet the maternity care needs of women with disabilities.

Conclusion

Cambodian midwives have identified several barriers to delivering disability-inclusive maternity care. To address these challenges, it is crucial to incorporate disability training into both pre-service and in-service training programs. Establishing evidence-based guidelines for disability-inclusive maternity care, ensuring essential physical resources, and developing accessible and reliable functional referral systems are priorities. Furthermore, midwives would benefit from receiving training in communicating with women with diverse disabilities and in collecting and assessing data on disability-related care needs when women with disabilities access maternity care services.

Statement of Significance

Globally, women with disabilities encounter substantial socio-economic and health disparities, which are further exacerbated by systemic barriers in accessing essential health services. This is particularly evident in maternity care, where women with disabilities often encounter obstacles such as inaccessible facilities, a lack of awareness about disabilities among healthcare providers, discriminatory attitudes, communication barriers, and limited financial resources to access the necessary care. Although healthcare providers have cited providing maternity care services to women with disabilities as a rewarding experience, several barriers hinder their ability to provide maternity care services with disability inclusion. Numerous global studies have identified the challenges faced by healthcare providers in providing maternity services to this population, including insufficient disability training, a lack of evidence-based guidelines, a lack of functional referral systems, and limited essential physical resources. However, there remains a limited understanding of context-specific factors influencing healthcare providers’ capability and experiences, which impedes efforts to support healthcare providers, particularly in resource-constrained settings in low- and middle-income countries such as Cambodia. This knowledge gap negatively impacts the capacity of healthcare providers in offering disability-inclusive care and contributes to ongoing disparities in maternity care outcomes for women with disabilities. Therefore, this study aims to explore the experiences of Cambodian midwives regarding the provision of maternity care services for women with disabilities in Cambodia. In so doing, this study seeks to understand the barriers and facilitators that midwives encounter when delivering services to women with disabilities. This study provides empirical evidence about the challenges and facilitators faced by Cambodian midwives in delivering maternity care services to women with disabilities in a resource-constrained setting. The findings contribute to the existing body of knowledge related to maternity care for women with diverse types of disabilities, which could be used to inform policy, planning, practice, and strategies to improve disability-inclusive maternity care in Cambodia and other countries with similar contexts.