Three health facilities from the public, private and church health sectors are at the heart of this research. How do they operate? How do they deliver health services? Those are some of the questions that we have examined. Taking maternal health as our subject and adopting a systematic comparative approach, we explored the daily life of the three health facilities (Biasa, Bè and Sainte Anne) in an African capital, Lomé (Togo). Based on an ethnographic approach, this work, beyond highlighting the variations and constants in the daily functioning and delivery of maternal care in the three services. Through human resources training and maternal health reforms, he also examines the relations between health facilities and the State and addresses the issue of the pervasiveness of politics in the three health facilities, among others. The research comes to the conclusion that the operation and delivery of services in the three health centres were divergent in terms of structural aspects (administrative organisation, human and material resources, etc.), but have a strong air of familiarity in the concrete aspects of care (almost the same deviations from official protocols, the same carer-treated relationships, the same "experiences" of carers and cared-for, etc.). This result, which is beyond all suspicion from both an etic and emic point of view, leads us to question the hypothetical causalities that could shape this reality. Without falling into a certain determinism, it appeared to us that the similarity observed in the practical functioning of the three care structures despite their structural differences can be explained by the joint effects of the local professional culture of the carers and the culture of the cared-for at work in Lomé. The conclusions about the similarities and differences between Biasa, Bè and Sainte Anne have prompted us to discuss some "preconceived ideas" about the nature of care most often associated with the different sectors of membership of the health care institutions studied. They also allowed us to re-examine the relationship between the structural elements of health services and the nature of the care provided. Then, to admit and defend that the functioning of health services is much more a function of the human aspects (culture of the carers and cared for, etc.) than of the structural aspects (human resources, material and financial resources, etc.).