WOMEN’S BIRTHPLACE CHOICE

The present work intends to explore choice dynamics and outcomes related to birth and its health treatment. Although these types of issues are usually studied by medical literature, this works try to include a consumer behavior perspective over the topic. Particularly, this work’s aim is to explore pregnant women (and new mothers’) healthcare choice behavior. This work focuses on the process of mothers’ birthplace choice, taking into account the possible influencing factors. Although most of the healthcare information search and location choice is faced by medical literature, this works wants to address the same issue, which are in fact classic consumer behavior issues, providing new insight and multidisciplinary interest over this topic. In order to address this aim, the literature review was undergone following two different streams: firstly, mother care and childcare international literature was revised, to provide a general state of art, but also to foresee the emerging issues and the possible information sources which pregnant woman access to deal with those, secondly the literature studying the individual choice of the health treatment place/location within the consumer behavior literature. The value of this research is not only in providing a different perspective over mother care, including a consumer behavior side, studying the determinants of women’s decision process and their specific weight, implying also interaction with the social context (both digital and geographic), but also in enabling all stakeholders to be more aware of this. In particular, this allow implications in terms of institutions, policy makers, healthcare providers, healthcare financers, professionals and maternity care users involvement, who then would be able to consult a complete picture of the sentiment towards this theme, from the perspective of the key subjects, the number one stakeholder: pregnant women and new mothers.