IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0216763.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Treatment-seeking for vaginal fistula in sub-Saharan Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Samson Gebremedhin
  • Anteneh Asefa

Abstract

Background: There is dearth of data regarding the treatment-seeking practice of women living with vaginal fistula. The paper describes the health-seeking behaviour of fistula cases in the sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) where the burden of the problem is high. Methods: The data of 1,317 women who ever experienced fistula-related symptom were extracted from 16 national Demographic and Health Surveys carried out in SSA between 2010 and 2017. The association between treatment-seeking and basic socio-demographic characteristics was analysed via mixed-effects logistic regression and the outputs are provided using adjusted odds ratio (AOR) with 95% confidence intervals (CI). Results: Among all women who had fistula-related symptom, 67.6% encountered the problem soon after delivery, possibly implying obstetric fistula. Fewer identified sexual assault (3.8%) and pelvic surgery (2.7%) as the underlying cause. In 25.8% of the cases clear-cut causes couldn’t be ascertained and, excluding these ambiguous causes, 91.2% of the women possibly had obstetric fistula. Among those who ever had any kind of fistula, 60.3% (95% CI: 56.9–63.6%) sought treatment and 28.5% (95% CI: 25.3–31.6%) underwent fistula-repair surgery. The leading reasons for not seeking treatment were: unaware that it can be repaired (21.4%), don’t know where to get the treatment (17.4%), economic constraints (11.9%), the fistula healed by itself (11.9%) and feeling of embarrassment (7.9%). The regression analysis indicated, teenagers as compared to adults 35 years or older [AOR = 0.31 (95% CI: 0.20–47)]; and women without formal education compared to women with formal education [AOR = 0.69 (95% CI: 0.51–0.93)], had reduced odds of treatment-seeking. In 25.9% of the women who underwent fistula-repair surgery, complete continence after surgery was not achieved. Conclusion: Treatment-seeking for fistula remains low and it should be improved through addressing health-system, psycho-social, economic and awareness barriers.

Suggested Citation

  • Samson Gebremedhin & Anteneh Asefa, 2019. "Treatment-seeking for vaginal fistula in sub-Saharan Africa," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(11), pages 1-11, November.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0216763
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0216763
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0216763
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0216763&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0216763?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0216763. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.