Survey Result of Malaysia Confinement Service

Postnatal confinement or ‘zuo yue zi’ is the tradition of Chinese culture, which normally the mother is expected to follow a complex set of rules to care for themselves and recover their body energy. I believe most of the Chinese heard about the confinement taboos such as “one should not bathe or wash hair, rest on the bed like all the time, stay indoors and so on. However, as time goes by we all learned that some of the taboos are not scientific. Nowadays, most of the family have dual income, the parents need to balance work and family. Hence, even the elders at home might not have time to take care the new born. As a result, confinement service has become more important to mothers and babies.

Most of the young mothers are not familiar with confinement service, they do not know the details of confinement service especially its market price. In order to further understand the confinement service, a confinement service survey was carried out online by Lookp.com recently. Basically, the confinement service can be divided into two groups which is confinement lady and confinement centre. Based on our research, most of the mothers engaged the service of confinement lady and there are lesser mothers who engaged confinement centre. Nevertheless, the result of our survey shows the percentage of confinement centre users is increasing significantly in recent years.

The respondents agreed with consensus that the most important criteria in choosing a confinement service is the knowledge and experience in the area of confinement, followed by good hygiene and confinement meals. From this, we can see that price is not the main consideration of mothers when choosing a confinement service, what they actually care is whether they are able to enjoy the confinement period with quality service.  Yet, I guess some of you could not agree with this statement or maybe you are interested to know more about the price right?

The average cost of service by confinement lady is RM 4,010, but the cost of confinement meals are excluded. The cost of engaging confinement centre is higher as compare to confinement lady, the most will spend about RM7,000 to RM8,000 for the service of confinement centre, the average spending is RM 7,093.

Although the cost differs by about RM3,000 but once you consider the cost of confinement meals, which are included in the package of the service of confinement centre, the difference of both services in term of price is actually not that much. Besides, according to our survey, those who used confinement centre are much more satisfied with the service and most of them think the money is well spent.

Apart from that, according to our research, 80% of respondents who engaged the service of confinement centre are satisfied with the service, and their satisfaction level is 25 % higher if compared to other mothers. I believe one of the reasons is the staffs of the confinement centre had went through several training to become a qualified service provider to provide consistent quality service and modernised confinement service.

The table below shows the top 3 most satisfied area for both confinement lady and confinement centre:

But, I have to point out that most of them are not satisfied with the knowledge of confinement lady in confinement area, meanwhile they also do not agree with the statement that confinement lady is able to give suggestion based on the condition of mother and baby.  The reason of the low satisfaction level may due to the confinement lady unable to deliver consistent quality service, some of them are too superstitious to follow all the taboos, and they deliver the service based on their experience in confinement industry without the recognition of any certificate. Hence, mothers are more concern about their confinement knowledge. In addition, polarization of recommended and not recommended happens within the mothers who engaged service of confinement lady, there is 48% of them will recommend the confinement lady to others, but not recommended rate also reaches up to 31%. By contrast, knowledge of confinement centre in confinement area fulfilled the requirement of mothers as the most important criteria, so most of them agreed that they are willing to recommend the centre to others.

The respondents who engaged the service of confinement centre found the centre mainly through social network such as Facebook, while the mothers who engaged the service of confinement lady found out the confinement lady through recommendations from friends and family. This may due to the reason that those confinement ladies are not active in social network. In order to attract more customers, the confinement lady should keep up with the pace of fast changing technology to involve themselves in social network and it may help them to enlarge their social circle.  At the same time, the confinement centre need to protect their reputation over the internet, they need to help the people who leave them enquires and solve their problem regarding to confinement. Nonetheless, recommendation of friends and family seem is the most reliable source of information, therefore deliver consistent and quality service is also very important.

Additionally, we also collected the suggestions of mothers through the survey as shown in the table below to assist the service provider to improve themselves and bring up the whole confinement industry in Malaysia.

Based on our research, 79% of the mothers who have not experience the confinement service are planning to engage confinement service in the future. Their average budget is within the range of RM4,000 to RM5,000. On the contrary, the reasons of not planning to engage confinement mainly are the cost of confinement service, elders at home can help to take care the new born baby, do not have extra room for confinement lady to stay in or without transportation to confinement centre. I think confinement centre can take this opportunity to launch the package with transportation service or open more branches in other areas.

If you wish to know more about confinement service, you can search our company website, or read the articles of our blog. Bear in mind, if you wish to engage confinement service, please do your homework earlier to know more about confinement service, this is because based on our research it shows that respondents who search for confinement service more than 6 months before actual birth date are more satisfied with the choice of confinement service provider.