Maternal’ Awareness of Antenatal Care on Impact of Mothers’ and Newborn Health in Bangladesh

Abstract

Background: Globally, maternal and infant morbidity and mortality is a serious public health problem. Maternal mortality rate in Bangladesh is 176 per lack live births which remain high as Government set target to be achieved by 2016. Antenatal care is extremely important health care service for the mothers’ and unborn fetus during pregnancy. It is well recognized that good antenatal care improves maternal, perinatal and neonatal outcomes. Objective: To identify the maternal awareness of antenatal care on impact of mothers’ and newborn health in Bangladesh. Methods: The study was conducted by using descriptive and cross-sectional design. This study was approved by the appropriate authority and informed consent forms were obtained from the participants. Two hundred forty-one of rural and two hundred one urban mothers completed three sets of questionnaires: 1) Socio-demographic, 2) Maternal Awareness and 3) Impact of Awareness. Content validity was done by the experts and internal consistency of these instruments was satisfactory with Cronbach’s alpha over 0.74. Result: The average awareness scores of rural and urban mothers were 18.54 ± 2.77 and 19.69 ± 2.16 respectively. The mean scores of impact on rural and urban mothers were 9.41 ± 2.13 and 9.39 ± 2.25 respectively. Maternal’ awareness of antenatal care; impact of mothers’ and newborn health were found statistically significant (t = 68.54, p < 0.001) and (t = 59.11, p < 0.001) different among rural and urban mother’s. It was observed that maternal’ awareness of antenatal care and impact of mothers’ and newborn health were significantly difference between rural and urban mothers’ (x2 = 211.869, p 0.004 and (x2 = 157.772, p 0.002 respectively). Conclusions: The findings indicated that maternal’ awareness of antenatal care on impact of mothers’ and newborn health was statistically significant different between rural and urban mothers’. Further intervention study is needed to evaluate the effect of intervention on maternal and child health outcomes that represent the whole population.