Factors Affecting Adequacy of Prenatal Care in Suburban Women of Southeast Iran: A Cross-sectional Study

Introduction: Prenatal and delivery care should be considered as a priority for women and society's health. Residents of the suburbs are among the groups who do not have enough access to such services. Aim: The present study aimed to determine the pregnancy care as well as factors affecting adequacy of prenatal care for suburban women in Southeast Iran. Materials and Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted from July 2016 to December 2016. A total of 384 women were evaluated by a single stage cluster random sampling. Inclusion criteria included women living in Zahedan suburbs areas and women in their reproductive ages who gave birth. Exclusion criteria was the history of diseases affecting pregnancy and multiple pregnancies. Safe motherhood questionnaire was completed by face to face interview in order to gather data. The questionnaire includes items for assessing prenatal and delivery care. Descriptive, chi-square and Spearman's correlation coefficient tests were used to analyse data. SPSS version 20.0 software was used for analyses. A p-value <0.05 was considered significant. Results: A total of (n=372, 96.9%) of subjects received prenatal care but (n=189, 50.8%) of them received inadequate care. There was a statistically significant relationship between adequate care and women's education level (p-value=0.009), marriage age (p-value <= 0.001), husband's education (p-value=0.05), husband's employment status (p=0.01), age in the first pregnancy (p-value=0.003), the time intervals among pregnancies (p-value=0.04), place of receiving care (p-value=0.004) and health care provider (p-value=0.006). Conclusion: We found that most of suburban women did not receive adequate prenatal care, although, free health services were available for these mothers. Individual, familial features, care provider and place of receiving services were found effective for the quality and productivity of such services.