A study was made attempting to analyse the availability of maternity services in the City of Salvador, Brazil. A questionaire was designed aiming at to obtain information on the type of the hospital, owner ship, number of existing lying-beds, length of stay and percentage of occupation of hospital beds. The kind of natal care delivered by the time of the admission, was obtained from the book of ocurrences of each institution, while the mortality data to the period 1961-1970 were derived from two different sources. The study was conducted in the first period of 1971 and has indicated: a high demand for the hospital beds maintained by the state government and a very low length of stay in most of the lying in hospitals. The abortion rate observed in 1970 as well as the maternal mortality rates were found extremelly high, and both aspects of maternity care appeared as important public health problems in the City of Salvador.
Maternity services; Abortion; Mortality; Hospital care
