Prevalence of early postnatal care services utilization and associated factors among postnatal women of Wolkite town, Gurage zone, Southern Ethiopia: a community-based cross-sectional study

Objective: Early postnatal care service utilization in developing countries is one of the health care service utilization problems among postnatal women, which is related to extensive maternal and neonatal complications and mortality. Identification of the prevalence of early postnatal care services utilization and associated factors among postnatal women is imperative to develop intervention measures to mitigate their complications and public health impact, which is not well known in Ethiopia, particularly in the selected study area. Thus, this study aimed to assess the prevalence of early postnatal care services utilization and associated factors among postnatal women of Wolkite town, southeast Ethiopia.

Design: A community-based cross-sectional study design was conducted among 301 postnatal women from 15 May to 15 June 2021. 

Measurements: Data were collected using a pretested structured questionnaire. The collected data were cleaned and entered Epidata3.1 and then exported to SPSS version 23:00 for analysis. Finally, a multivariate logistic regression model was fitted to identify the factors associated with early postnatal care services utilization. The p-value <0.05 was considered statistically significant.

Results: The finding showed that the prevalence of early postnatal care services utilization was 23.3% (95% CI: 18.9 to 27.9). Wanted pregnancy (AOR=4.17, 95% CI 1.93 to 9.03), had over 4 histories of pregnancy (Gravida >4) (AOR=2.90, 95% CI 1.18 to 7.11), and had spontaneous vertex delivery (AOR=2.18, 95% CI 1.07 to 9.39) were statistically significant factors of early postnatal care service utilization.

Conclusion: The study has shown that the prevalence of early postnatal care services utilization was slightly low when compared to other studies. Thus, community-based health promotion should be an important recommendation to increase early postnatal care service utilization among postnatal mothers to improve the level of awareness of early postnatal checkup schedules; done by health care providers.