Knowledge of Socio-Demographic Factors Influencing Health Service Usage Among Pregnant Mothers in Nigeria

Abstract

Poor knowledge of socio-demographic factors limit access and utilization of health care services among pregnant women. The objectives of this paper are to examine the factors which influence health care usage and to suggest policy guidelines to boost the use of healthcare particularly among antenatal women. The study covers five (5) rural political wards of Ado-Odo/Ota Local Government Area in Ogun State, Nigeria. A stratified sampling technique was adopted in selecting the respondents who were ever married women in child bearing age (15-49) years who had at least one live-birth in the last three years preceding the survey. Stratified sampling technique was employed because the study was based on different political wards. It enabled more consistent responses within each political ward. This technique consists in taking random samples within each selected ward and combining it with samples proportionate to the size of each ward to ensure representative of the population for wider generalization of findings. On the whole, 260 female respondents were randomly selected from five wards out of the sixteen wards. Data were gathered through questionnaire instrument and analyzed statistically using statistical package for social sciences. Regression analysis showed that treatment decision and distance to health facility are negatively related to health program usage by pregnant mothers. Educational attainments, payment of treatment bills, respondent's age and husband's perception about pregnancy are positively associated to antennal care (ANC) use. Also, since the F-statistics calculated is greater than the F-tabulated thereby validating the hypothesis that the sociodemographic characteristics of the respondents are significantly related to the health program usage by pregnant mothers. The above findings show that education, husband's perception about pregnancy, treatment decision and payment of treatment cost weigh more on the use of modern health care services. Hence, Costs alleviation for women seeking antenatal care and delivery services should be put in place to encourage women to use health services and government should give priority to women education and empowerment. In addition, effort should be made to revitalize rural health facilities and establish mid-way service delivery points to reduce the problem of distance.

A Comparative Study of Predictors of Health Service Utilization among Rural and Urban Areas in Ilorin East Local Government Area of Kwara State

“…Utilization in the preceding one month before the study showed that most respondents in the rural community had visited health facilities in their community between 1-2 times more than their urban counterparts. The findings in this study were supported by the result of an appraisal of factors preventing utilization of health services among the rural population in Owerri, South-East, Nigeria (28). The study showed that health care providers in the rural areas were not only a few but have been deprived of necessary tools for service delivery, as a result, rural health care is at risk; the consequences to healthcare delivery were identified in a southern Nigerian study (31) as inadequate health personnel, diagnostic services available in some urban centers were also found to be non-existent in rural areas by Siraff T. in Ashanti region of Ghana (32).…”

“…Two important factors played role in the findings in our study, in the first instance a tertiary health center, the university teaching hospital is located close to one of the selected rural communities, and therefore, it was easy for the rural inhabitant to access the health facility. However, there is an increasing awareness of the importance of health care utilization among these rural community members and it is a confirmation of the need to provide health facilities close to rural communities (28,29,30).…”

Socio-Cultural Factors of Gender Roles in Women’s Healthcare Utilization in Southwest Nigeria

“…In an intra-familial power dynamics and attitudes study of 317 households in two rural districts of central Mali, [56] found that the preferences and opinions of mothers-in-law were associated with the maternal health behaviors of their daughters-in-law. In addition, they also observed that women's own perceptions of their self-efficacy, the value of women in society and the quality of services at the local health facility were independently associated with their preventive and health-seeking practices.…”