Maternal and Newborn Care Continuum Partner Encouragement among a Cohort of Pregnant Women in Ethiopia

Abstract

Introduction: The World Health Organization strongly recommend partner encouragement on the use of domains of maternal and newborn care continuum. Objective: quantifying the level of husband and/or partner encouragement for antenatal care visit and/or discussion about where to delivery as part of the maternal and newborn care continuum and identifying its correlates. Design: Longitudinal follow up study Setting: Ethiopia. Participants: A cohort of 6 weeks postpartum women. Intervention: Partner encouragement on the first two domains of maternal and newborn care continuum Primary and Secondary Outcome measures: the primary outcome was Partner and/or husband encouragement on the first two domains of maternal and newborn care continuum Methods: PMA cohort 2 baseline and six weeks postpartum data sets were used for this study. Multinomial logistics regression was run to identify correlates of partner encouragement. Statistical significance was declared at p-value of 0.05. Results: The proportion of partner encouraged for both domains was 68.00% (65.58%, 70.14%). There is regional variation in partner encouragement towards maternal and new born care continuum domains by women age marriage type and whether the index pregnancy and by contraceptive use history and was planned. Conclusions: Region specific age sensitive activities and efforts that empower women to have control over their fertility and which also addressed polygamy are hoped to improve husband and/or partner encouragement. Diversifying access to contraceptive commodities is likely to help the ministry and other developmental parents to address the husband and/or partner CoC encouragement in terms of policy articulation and advocacy.