Abstract:
Background: The involvement of men in antenatal care can play a vital role in ensuring safe
pregnancy, delivery and moral support to the women. Only a few studies have been conducted
about the husband knowledge and practice on antenatal care involvement and little is known.
Objective: To assess husbands‘ knowledge, practice and associated factors in antenatal care
service user in Ambo District, West Shoa zone, Oromia, Ethiopia 2024.
Methods: Community based cross-sectional complemented with qualitative study was
conducted from January 1-30/2024 among 597 husbands whom their wives visited ANC in
Ambo district health facility selected by simple random sampling. Structured and pretested
questionnaire used to collect the quantitative data through interviewing technique while in-depth
interview used to generate qualitative information from 12 model house hold and 12 Village
leaders from selected kebele. The collected data inserted into Epidata version 3.1and exported
into SPSS version 25 for analysis. Descriptive analysis was used for summarizing the study
variables. Binary logistic regression analysis was done and variables with p-value <0.25 in
bivariate analysis were transferred to multivariate analysis. In multivariate, a p-value <0.05 and
OR with 95% CI considered for the presence of statistically significant association.
Result: From the total of 597, 596 gave complete response to the interview yielding a response
rate of 99.8%. In this study, 260(43.8%) and 210(35%) of the study participants had good
knowledge and good practice regarding antenatal care service utilization respectively. Education
status of the husbands (CI: 1.6-4.4), number of children (CI: 0.003-0.203), couple discussion
about pregnancy (CI: 0.10-0.23) and distance from health facility (CI: 0.18-0.59) were
significant association with knowledge and practices of husbands on antenatal care.
Conclusion: Overall Knowledge and practice of the study participants were poor. Education
status of the husbands, number of children they have, Education status of wife, couple discussion
about pregnancy and distance from health facility were variables that showed significant
association with knowledge and practices of husbands on antenatal care. Hence, adequate
training for husbands on antenatal care, availing health facilities and strengthening couple
discussion on pregnancy care in the community of the study area has to be enhanced.
