Abstract:

Background: Antenatal care (ANC) is the care provided by skilled health-care professional to pregnant women and adolescent girls in order to ensure the best health conditions for both mother and the baby during pregnancy. For a pregnancy woman to fully benefit these services, she must attend to the antenatal care timely and at the frequency as recommended by the WHO. WHO recommend that pregnant women should have their first contact within the first 12 weeks of gestation, and subsequent contacts taking place at 20, 26, 30, 34, 36, 38 and 40 weeks of gestation.

Objective: To determine the timing of first antenatal care visit and factors associated with it delay among pregnant women in Nyamagana district.

Methods: This was facility based cross sectional study, involved pregnant women in Nyamagana district and it involved 400 pregnant women attended for ANC in public RCH during the time of study. Data was collected through pretested semi structured questionnaire. Data collected was entered and analysed using IBM SPSS Statistics 23 program.

Results: A total of 400 participants were involved in the study. Out of those 285 (58.7%) booked late for ANC services. Late ANC booking was mainly associated with maternal age (P value of 0.046), marital status, mother’s education level and economic activities (all with a P value of < 0.001), knowledge of ANC (0.003) and all obstetric variables except for previous ANC attendance (P value of 0.209).

Conclusion and Recommendation: Late first antenatal clinic visit was high in Nyamagana district and was highly associated with lack of knowledge on ANC services. So provision of continuous health education about ANC services and community sensitization on the importance of timely seeking ANC services should be strengthened.