The effects of outreach on perceived quality of care in two rural areas of Bangladesh

The 1994 Cairo Conference on Population and Development consensus called for actions that will make family planning programmes oriented to the needs and concerns of women that are served. This paper, based on data from Bangladesh, presents an illustrative analysis of how an outreach programme can be evaluated by this criterion. A scale for perceived service quality is developed from five indicators of desirable characteristics of services. Regression methods are used to assess the impact of outreach service encounters on the perceived quality scale. Econometric methods are used to adjust for endogeneity that arises from the selectivity of outreach encounters and the selective service exposure of contraceptive users. Results show that increasing contact with outreach workers increases client satisfaction with the overall quality of the Bangladesh family planning programme.