Abstract:
Background: Maternal mortality remained persistently high in Ethiopia. Home delivery with
unskilled birth attendant and delay in seeking care for complications are often reported to be
among the main contributing factors. While ANC provides opportunity to empower pregnant
women on pregnancy risk and benefits of skilled care, most ANC clients opt for home delivery.
Objective: To identify pregnancy-related risk perception among pregnant women attending
antenatal clinics in Wolisso district of Oromiya Regional State, Ethiopia.
Methods: A cross-sectional facility-based study was conducted in February and March 2011.
Results: Data were obtained from 434 pregnant mothers attending antenatal clinic with a
response rate of 98%. Only 18% (95%CI= 14.4%, 21.6%) of them perceived pregnancy-related
risk. Knowledge of 2 or more danger signs during pregnancy, delivery and postpartum were
27%, 6% and 14.5% respectively. In multivariate analysis, risk perception was higher among
mothers who had >4 ANC visits (OR= 3.60, 95%CI= 1.20, 10.81) and complications during
current pregnancy (OR= 9.90, 95%CI= 4.40, 22.22) while knowledge of 2 or more danger signs
during pregnancy was higher among urban residents (OR=4.41, 95%CI=1.73, 11.19), mothers
who had complication during current pregnancy (OR= 2.90, 95%CI= 1.30, 6.50), ANC clients
who received information (OR= 4.76, 95%CI= 1.74, 13.08) and mothers who had two and three
antenatal care visits (OR= 3.25, 95%CI= 1.34, 7.93; OR= 3.31, 95%CI= 1.29, 8.49) respectively.
Conclusion and recommendations: The majority of pregnant women have high false sense of
security against risk and lack of awareness about obstetric danger signs, which eventually result
in delay in seeking care for pregnancy complications. This is likely to be true for seeking skilled
attendant at birth. Therefore, IEC/BCC interventions should be strengthened, especially in rural
areas. Besides, the result of the study depicted the clear benefit of optimal use of antenatal care,
but it was found to be very low. Therefore, strategies to enhance optimal use of antenatal care
should be identified, tested and scale up. .
