Institutional Delivery over Repeated Number of Births in India: A Comparative Performance of Private and Public Healthcare Systems

Laxmi Kant Dwivedi, International Institute for Population Sciences (IIPS)

Over past decade indeed, there is a near-absence of studies that have identified relative roles of public and private hospitals in consistent use of institutional delivery services for all observe siblings. Hence, objective of this study is to understand effects of place of delivery (public and private hospitals) of older siblings on subsequent institutional delivery in India using NFHS 2005-06 data. To fulfil objective multilevel binary logistic regression model and multivariate multilevel analytical approach has been applied. Unconstrained binomial variance parameter shows that data constructed in a multivariate multilevel model have followed binomial assumption. Finding shows that correlations between successive pregnancies were high in private hospitals compared to public hospitals. This suggests that once decision has been made for the place of delivery of first birth in a private hospital, behavior of mother is unlikely to change for subsequent birth.