Quality Of Family Planning Counseling Service And Associated Factors Among Women Visiting Family Planning Units Of Public Health Centers At Sebata Town, Oromia, Ethiopia, 2022

Abstract

Background: Family planning counseling is a continuous process that a counselor provides to help clients and groups of people make and arrive at informed choices about the size of their family. Poor-quality family planning counseling has its own role in the low rates of contraceptive continuation in Ethiopia. However, little is known about the quality of family planning counseling services in Ethiopia. Objective: To assess the quality of family planning counseling service and associated factors among women visiting the family planning unit of public health centers at Sebata town, Oromia, Ethiopia, 2022. Methods: A facility-based cross-sectional study supplemented with a qualitative study design was conducted among clients attending family planning from August 1 to September 30, 2022. A systematic random sampling technique was used to recruit 384 study participants. The exit interview, observational checklist, key informant interview, and facility audit were used to collect the data, finally the quality of counseling service were measured by Method Information Index Plus which was collected by open data kit and exported to SPSS version 26 for analysis. To identify factors, bivariable and multivariable ordinal logistic regression were used. Adjusted odds ratios with 95% confidence intervals were calculated, and a p-value of <0.05 was used to set statistically significant variables in the multivariable analysis. Result: According to the current finding 118 (30.7%) received higher-quality counseling. The study revealed that using long-acting methods (AOR: 0.42; 95% CI: 0.23, 0.75), maintaining the privacy (AOR: 2.80, 95% CI: 1.55, 5.05) and asking partner's attitude toward FP methods (AOR: 2.04, 95% CI: 1.19, 3.50) were factors associated with better quality of family planning counseling service. Findings from a qualitative study were discussed under five themes to explore barriers to quality of family planning counseling service. Conclusion: This study findings provision of higher quality family planning counseling service of Sebeta town public health centers was low. using long-acting methods, maintaining privacy, asking partner's attitude toward FP methods were found significantly associated with better quality of family planning counseling services. Therefore, it is necessary to pay greater attention to the factors that were identified and recommended for action by stakeholders in order to improve the quality of FP counseling