Childbirth is considered an unique and trans-formative moments for every woman [1]. It involves the process of bringing a new life into the world, which can be both physically and emotionally challenging [2]. The childbirth experience is a complex and multidimensional construct [3], which refers to ‘a personal life event comprised of interrelated subjective psychological and physiological processes, affected of social, environmental, organizational and policy contexts’[4, 5].
The World Health Organization (WHO) Labour Care Guideline recommended that addressing inequalities that affect health outcomes, especially sexual and reproductive health and rights and gender, is fundamental to ensuring all women have access to respectful and high-quality maternity care on intrapartum care for positive childbirth experience [6, 7]. Therefore, it’s essential to provide good-quality, evidence-based, respectful care during labour and childbirth, irrespective of the setting or level of health care for healthcare providers [8].
Childbirth experience is important because having a negative experience is linked to poorer mental health among postpartum women, which includes developing postpartum depression, anxiety, and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and the fear of next childbirth [9–11]. Furthermore, there is compelling evidence that indicates that improving birth satisfaction enhances women’s trust in facility-based care, which includes access to quality postnatal care [12–14]. As such, it is imperative to develop a short, valid, reliable, and theoretically supported measure to evaluate levels of childbirth experience and formulate effective strategies to improve intranatal care [15].
Several tools have been designed to measure women’s childbirth experience, among these existing scales [15], the questionnaire for assessing the childbirth experience (QACE) was designed from an extensive psychometric assessment, which resulted in production of a 13-item short-form version incorporated four sub-scales (1) emotional status, (2) relationship with staff, (3) first moments with the new born, and (4) feelings at one month postpartum [16]. Since the founder English -QACE was validated by [16], translations and validations have been carried out in French [17], Iran [18] and Spain [19], and good psychometric properties of QACE was confirmed.
In China, several researchers have used the revised Childbirth Experience Questionnaire (CEQ 2.0) and the Wijma Delivery Expectancy Questionnaire (WDEQ) to assess the childbirth experience [20–22]. However, the 13-item-QACE has more brevity, given that it is a quick and easy instrument for women to complete, compared to the 25-item-CEQ 2.0, the 33-item-WDED. Given that lack of a short assessment tool to examine childbirth satisfaction within a Chinese population, resulted in interest to translate and validate a Chinese version of the QACE. To this end, our aim was to translate and determine the key psychometric properties of a Chinese version of the QACE, to yield a short and easy to administer instrument for use within Chinese populations of postnatal women. Validation of a Chinese -QACE will provide an instrument which can be used to measure effectiveness of interventions designed to improve women’s experiences of childbirth, with the ultimate goal of improving standards of intranatal care provided in China.