A STUDY TO ASSESS THE ATTITUDE TOWARDS DIFFICULTIES FACED DURING ANTENATAL VISITS IN PANDEMIC SITUATION AMONG ANTENATAL MOTHERS AT SMVMCH, PUDUCHERRY.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic is posing considerable challenges for countries to maintain the provision of high quality, essential maternal and newborn health services. Pregnant women and mothers with newborns may experience difculties accessing services due to transport disruptions and lockdown measures or be reluctant to come to health facilities due to fear of infection. Thus, a modest decline of 10% in coverage of pregnancy related and newborn health-care services were reported due to pandemics. This would result in 28,000 maternal deaths Anxiety and stress are prevalent psychiatric disorders that can result in negative health outcomes in the long run. The risk factors of anxiety and stress are numerous among which personal factors and genetic susceptibility are the main important ones; furthermore, the inappropriate coping with the changing environment has been identied as an important source of stress that causes anxiety as well. Pregnancy is one of the life periods with a high frequency of stress and anxiety disorders, supposed to be triggered by hormonal and physical changes, the fear of the neonate's health, giving birth, and other pregnancy-related factors. Majority of the antenatal mothers 45 (90%) had moderately favourable level of attitude, 4(8%) had unfavourable level of attitude and 1(2%) had favourable level of attitude s and the mean and standard deviation of level of attitude towards difculties faced during antenatal visits in pandemic situation among antenatal mothers is (36.92+6.074) respectively. Therefore the study should be conducted to test the level of attitude about the difculties faced by the antenatal mothers during the pandemic situation in SMVMCH