Male Partner Involvement in the Utilization of Hospital Delivery Services by Pregnant Women Living with HIV in Sub Saharan Africa: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Objective The level of male partner involvement in hospital delivery by pregnant women living with HIV in sub Saharan Africa (SSA) is low. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis to identify the approaches that are used in improving male partner involvement and their impact on the utilization of hospital delivery services by pregnant women living with HIV in SSA. Methods Ovid Medline, Embase, PsycINFO, Cochrane library, ClinicalTrials.gov, Web of Science and Current Controlled Trials were searched. Only studies carried out in SSA that reported an approach used in involving male partners and the impact on the uptake of hospital delivery services irrespective of the language and date of publication were included. Odds ratios were extracted or calculated from studies and combined in a meta-analysis using the statistical package Stata version 11.0. A forest plot was used to show the impact of various male involvement approaches. A funnel plot was used to report publication bias. Results From an initial 2316 non-duplicate articles, 08 articles were included in the systematic review and meta-analysis. The overall pooled OR was 1.56 (95% CI 1.45–1.68). After stratification, the odds ratios were: 1.51 (95% CI 1.38–1.65), 1.58 (95% CI 1.38–1.80), 3.47 (95% CI 2.16–5.58) for complex community interventions without community health workers (CHWs), complex community interventions with community health workers, and verbal encouragement respectively. The overall I-square was 91.0% but after stratification into the three different approaches, the I-squared within the complex community intervention without CHWs group was 0.0%. Conclusions for Practice Complex community interventions and verbal encouragement increase the utilization of hospital delivery services by pregnant women living with HIV in SSA. The overall heterogeneity was high but very low for studies that used complex community interventions without CHWs. More well conducted studies (including randomized controlled trials) are needed in future to add to the quality of evidence.