Factors Associated with Maternal Regular Attendance and Default at Antenatal Clinic in Ile-Ife , Osun State

Background: Every year, more than 200 million women become pregnant. Pregnancy is a normal physiological process and most pregnancies end with the birth of a live baby. Pregnancy is not a disease and pregnancy-related mortality and morbidity are preventable with attainable simple and cost-effective interventions. However, all pregnancies involve some risk to the mother or infant and it is important to prevent, detect, and manage complications early before they become life-threatening emergencies and that is what Antenatal care offers. Antenatal care is considered the foundation for the normal development, adequate growth, and good health of the mother and fetus. Antenatal care is the care given to a woman during pregnancy. It is a systematic plan of preventive and therapeutic care implemented through a schedule of visits between clients and members of the health care team to enable the client (pregnant woman), the fetus and family go through the intrapartum period maximally using all resources to get the best possible outcome of pregnancy. Therefore, Antenatal care is widely used for the prevention, early diagnosis, and treatment of general medical and pregnancy-related complications. Purpose: The purpose of the study was to assess the factors associated with attendance and default/non-attendance at Antenatal clinic by pregnant women in Ile-Ife. Methodology: A descriptive research design was employed. Purposive random sampling was used to select 80 pregnant women attending the Health facilities selected for the study. A 29-item questionnaire was used to elicit information from the women. Data collected was analyzed using descriptive statistics such as frequency table and percentage. Results: Findings revealed that all the 80 (100%) respondents had heard about Antenatal care. 33 (41.3%) were defaulters and 47 (58.7%) attended their clinic regularly and up to date. Factors associated with non-attendance were lack of finance/money (21.2%), occupation/busy work schedule (30.3%), the absence of illness/healthy status (27.3%), and distance (21.2%). The main factor associated with regular attendance of antenatal clinic was good knowledge of the benefit of antenatal care. The recommendation given was that defaulters should be followed up and visited at their respective homes and education on the importance of regular attendance at ANC stressed to them. Discussion: The findings of this study highlighted the factors associated with regular maternal attendance and default at Antenatal clinic by pregnant women. All the respondents had heard about Antenatal care and were aware of it. About 79% of the respondents got information about antenatal care from neighbours, friends, and relatives who had attended antenatal clinic before. Only 21% of the respondents heard through a nurse. This implies that nurses, midwives, and the health team members need to put up strategies that will assist in reaching a large proportion of pregnant women. From the study, 41.3% of the respondents were defaulters. Some of them default because of their occupation. Those that are traders travel to buy goods or go to the market to sell when the clinic days fall on major market days. Those that are government workers default when they are not granted permission in the workplace. The farmers among them go to farm at times to get farm products for the family. Some default because of lack of money for transportation, the lack of money to buy needed materials and items/pay for services at the clinic. Some said there was no need to attend Antenatal clinic as far as they are healthy. It was also discovered that majority of those who attend ANC regularly were Primigravidae while the multigravidae and grand multigravidae