Awareness about government maternal benefit schemes among pregnant women attending Anganawadi centres in North Karnataka

Abstract

Background: During pregnancy and child birth women are very much vulnerable to sickness and complications. Maternal morbidity and mortality can be reduced by giving proper preventive and promotive health care specially by promoting early registration, regular antenatal check-ups and institutional deliveries. There is an improvement in care since last decade. Still there is a long way in achieving complete success out of these National programmes.Methods: A cross-sectional study was done in six Anganawadi centres in rural field practice area of medical college for a period of 4 months from 1st June 2017 to 30th September 2017. Universal sampling was adopted to include all registered pregnant women. Informed consent was taken. A pre-designed semi-structured questionnaire was used to collect data. Appropriate descriptive statistics like proportion and percentage were used describe and to draw the inferences.Results: A total of 104 pregnant women were included. Most of them were in the age group of 20 to 30 years 76 (73.1%). More than half were in third trimester 60 (57.7%), seeking antenatal care from both government and private facilities equally. Awareness about various schemes ranged from minimum of 2 (1.9%) for JSSK to maximum of 102 (98.1%) for ICDS. ASHA workers 96 (92.3%) acted as source of information for majority of pregnant women followed by Anganawadi workers 88 (84.6%).Conclusions: Knowledge was adequate but not sufficient across all schemes hence more efforts should be done to overcome this discrepancy. Health care workers like ASHA and Anganawadi worker have put efforts in creating awareness.