Factors influencing decision to use antenatal care services among women in the University of Uyo Teaching Hospital, Uyo, Nigeria

Abstract

Background: Antenatal care is the care that a woman receives during pregnancy that helps to ensure healthy outcomes for the women and newborns. It is one of the pillars of safe motherhood initiative. Nigeria’s maternal mortality ratio is estimated to be 814/100,000 live births with regional variations. Proper antenatal care is a viable option at reducing maternal mortality rate in Nigeria.Materials and methods: This was a longitudinal study carried out at the antenatal clinic of the University of Uyo Teaching Hospital, Uyo, Akwa Ibom State. A purposive sampling method was adopted to recruit 330 eligible antenatal clinic attendees. A Semi-Structured Interviewer-administered questionnaire was used to obtain information on the background characteristics of respondents including socio-demographic characteristics and reasons for utilizing antenatal care. The data entry and analysis were done using SPSS version 17.0 with the level of significance set at p<0.05,Results: A total of 330 pregnant women were recruited for the study. The mean age of the respondents was 29.37± 4.255 with a range of 16-42 years. Nearly all the women were Christians (99.4%) and married (95.2%). About 80.6% lived in urban settlements and more than half of them (58.5%) and their husbands (68.5%) had tertiary level of education. Almost two-third of the respondents (64.5%) were of parity one to four. The most common reason for attending antenatal clinic was to assess foetal wellbeing (90.6%). In about one-third of respondents their husbands alone decided place to receive antenatal care while 27.3% decided jointly as a couple.Regression analysis of the data obtained showed two factors as being significant in decision to use antenatal care services. These were nature and extent of antenatal care services, and knowledge of benefits of use of antenatal care services.Conclusion: Decision to use antenatal care (ANC) services is mainly influenced by the desires of the pregnant women to have their babies assessed for wellbeing as well as to detect any pregnancy-related disorders. This shows that women have good knowledge of the benefits of routine antenatal care services.