Abstract:

Introduction: Cervical cancer is second commonest malignancy in females’ globally. It has devastating impacts in women’s health in developing countries especially Africa since more than 75% of the worldwide burden occur in these countries. It is the leading malignancy among women in Tanzania. This is widely associated with lack of awareness about the disease, lack of screening, poverty among people and hence they present very lately to the hospital with poor prognosis treatment outcomes. The main aim of this study is to know general awareness of cervical cancer screening and how can help to improve health of reproductive women.

Methodology: the study was a community based cross- sectional study that was conducted at SAUT in Mwanza region; involving women; 326 at reproductive age (15-29 years) who were consent to participate in the study were included. A structured questionnaire was used to gather information and data were analyzed by using statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) version software package.

Results: the findings from the study showed that majority about two third of the participants had moderate knowledge of cervical cancer screening, few (37.4%) had knowledge on visual inspection with Acetic Acid (VIA), majority of women of reproductive age (57.1%) did not know the standard time which a woman need to come back for screening, although most of them heard about cervical cancer and screening (83.7%). Majority of the participants (78.5%) said that there is benefits to them to perform cervical cancer screening, and other participants (85.5%) believed that cervical cancer is dangerous to their health and 75.5% of participant’s believed cervical cancer cause death whenever diagnosed in advanced stage. The major obstacle noted was lack of awareness about cancer screening from 62.3% of participants.

Conclusion and recommendation: general awareness about cervical cancer and screening is satisfactory even though the study findings revealed limited knowledge about when the interval for cancer screening is being done and lack of awareness of the services provision. Hence extensive health education programs to the public should be done to improve public knowledge with an emphasis for cervical cancer screening interval. And further studies should be done to assess the whether the information community is getting concerning cervical cancer and screening are from reliable sources.