Abstract
OBJECTIVE: This study was undertaken to address practical problems in maternal health care (MHC) utilization and conduct in-depth study of maternal health services utilization in underdeveloped countries(regions), thus to contribute to the achieving of the UN Millennium Development Goal 5. DATA COLLECTION: After searching and screening based on key words like "MHC" and "utilization", we included 45 English articles and 106 Chinese articles from Pubmed, Medline, China Knowledge Resource Integrated and Wang Fang data base. The research themes, issues, designs, perspectives, dimensions and methods of these dissertations were analyzed. RESULTS: The development of MHC utilization research can be divided into three phases: Studies of the first phase focused primarily on decreasing MMR, which caused attention to the central and western rural areas maternal health services in China from domestic as well as international community; Studies of the second phase centered around the practical impacts of the implementation of MHC relevant programs and policy, confirming that the implementation of these programs and policies improved MHC service delivery and utilization, and promoted cooperation between researchers and practitioners; Studies of the third phase focused on the quality of MHC service utilization. We also found that the major problem in the current MHC service utilization is the huge gap across regions and the existing researches lack innovation and comparison researches between in different countries. CONCLUSION: Research themes of MHC services change regularly. We should grasp the characteristics and defects of current research to increase the innovation of future research and to better response to the problem solving, and thus to provide more valuable reference for the policy and practice of underdeveloped countries and areas.