Abstract:

Evidence has shown that an unacceptably high level of maternal mortality versus low attendance to antenatal has been feature of global health and development discussions since the 1980s. Inadequate human resource for health where practically a patient may never see a physician, has prompted Zambian Ministry of Health (MOH) in 2003, to establish Safe Motherhood Action Groups (SMAGs) as part of a national safe motherhood program in view to increase the utilization of maternal healthcare services (MHS). Currently, in Kaoma district of Western Province, it is unknown how the SMAG program effectively impacts the increase on utilization of facility-based MHS. Therefore, our study aims to assess the trends of antenatal care visits in Kaoma district after training of Safe Motherhood Action Groups from 2020 to 2021. The study was quantitative in design and used standard data collection tools. A Causal Comparative method was used to establish the impacts of SMAGs on utilization of facility-based MHS. The overall results indicate that we had 15% increase in pregnant women attending first antenatal clinic with a slight decline of 3% of them attending subsequent antenatal revisits. Based on these results, we concluded that SMAG program, as a community intervention, effectively impacts the increase on utilization of facility-based maternal health services. Number of factors could have contributed to these variations at different levels: individual, interpersonal, facility or community.

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