Factors Influencing Utilization of Family Planning Methods Among Women of Reproductive Age (15-49) Attending Fort Portal Regional Referral Hospital In Fort Portal District.
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Date
2023
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IAA Journal of Applied Sciences
Abstract
Family planning, a pillar of safe motherhood is known for its benefits including limiting unwanted pregnancies, reducing infant and maternal mortality and morbidity. Evidence exists that spacing pregnancies by at least two years apart using family planning significantly reduces up to 35% of maternal deaths, 13% of child mortalities and up to 25% of under –five mortalities. Despite its efforts to spur family planning utilization, Uganda has one of the lowest contraceptive prevalence rates in the region. This is coupled with high maternal mortality ratio at 336 per 100,000 live births and neonatal mortality rates 27/1000 live births. Yet still, Uganda’s efforts to improve contraceptive uptake to about 50% by 2020 is still peculiar. Therefore, this research aimed to explore factors which influence utilization of FP among women of reproductive age (15-49) attending Fort Portal regional referral hospital in Fort Portal district. A cross-sectional descriptive study design was used and a total of 292 randomly selected women of reproductive age (15-49) at Fort Portal Regional Referral Hospital were enrolled into the study. Data on current use of family planning and related factors was collected using a researcher administered questionnaire, checked for completeness and analyzed using the statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) software version 25. Factors influencing family planning utilization were determined using logistic regression analysis and Qui square test while statistical significance was determined at pvalue≤0.05 and 95% confidence interval. The prevalence of contraceptive utilization was 29.79%. Our results indicated that age, marital status, parity, number of living children, age of the youngest child, time to have the next child, mode of delivery, partner discussion about family planning and female approval of family planning use were important predictors of family planning utilization at bivariate logistic regression analysis while only the age of the youngest child and expected time to have another child significantly influenced family planning utilization at multivariate regression analysis.