Perceived Quality of Care for Common Childhood Illnesses: Facility versus Community Based Providers in Uganda

To compare caretakers’ perceived quality of care (PQC) for under-fives treated for malaria, pneumonia and diarrhoea by community health workers (CHWs) and primary health facility workers (PHFWs).Caretaker rated PQC for children aged (2-59) months treated by either CHWs or PHFWs for a bought of malaria, pneumonia or diarrhoea was cross-sectionally compared in quality domains of accessibility, continuity, comprehensiveness, integration, clinical interaction, interpersonal treatment and trust. Child samples were randomly drawn from CHW (419) and clinic (399) records from eight Midwestern Uganda districts. An overall PQC score was predicted through factor analysis. PQC scores were compared for CHWs and PHFWs using Wilcoxon rank-sum test. Multinomial logistic regression models were used to specify the association between categorized PQC and service providers for each quality domain. Finally, overall PQC was dichotomized into “high” and “low” based on median score and relative risks (RR) for PQC-service provider association were modeled in a “modified” Poisson regression model.Mean (SD) overall PQC was significantly higher for CHWs 0.58 (0 .66) compared to PHFWs -0.58 (0.94), p