Reasons behind not Attending Antenatal Careamong Unbooked Patients Presenting at Abbasi Shaheed Hospital, Karachi

Abstract

In our hospital we noted that a large number of unbooked patients came for antenatal ckeckup for first time in later gestations and majority of them came in an emergency with life threating and preventable complications. This made us to look into this matter and find out the reasons. For this purpose we developed a proforma and interviewed all those unbooked patients coming in OPD and emergency in out patient to find out the cause of no utilization of antenatal care. A total of 415 patients were interviewed. We found that lack of literacy, lack of formal education and a lack of awareness about the importance of antenatal care prevailed among all such patients. Fear of high cost of treatment, lack of transport facility to and from the antenatal clinics or hospitals, pressure from the in laws were the main reasons for not getting antenatal care. We concluded that the improvement of infrastructure is needed to take care of the pregnant patients in these underprivileged areas. More antenatal clinics should be set up, lady health visitors should be increased in numbers and should also be trained to provide proper antenatal care, identify the risk factors and refer them early to tertiary care hospital. The transport facilities should be provided to all pregnant ladies for antenatal care and in emergency situations.