Compliance with health regimen among women attending Antenatal Clinic in Kaduna State

Background: About 96% of the global Maternal Mortality Rate (MMR) occur in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs), with sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) accounting the highest burden of 196,000 deaths. While the lifetime risk of a woman dying during pregnancy, childbirth, postpartum or post-abortion is 1 in 4900 in developed countries that of a Nigerian woman is 1 in 22. These deaths could result from either a delay in accessing care or failure to adhere to the accessed health regimen. Hence the present study on compliance to health regimen among women attending ante natal clinic in Kaduna State, Nigeria. Methods: A descriptive cross sectional approach was adopted for the study. Multistage sampling technique was adopted to select the respondents. Using ballot system, 230 out of 462 women were proportionately drawn and given semi-structured questionnaire for their responses. For compliance to health regimen in pregnancy, items were scored. The cumulative mean in each test item was compared with a standard/decision mean of 2.0. Cummulative score > 2.0 was considered positive agreement and if otherwise it denotes negative response while hypotheses’ testing was done using chi-square at statistical significance level of 0.05. Findings: The mean age of respondents was 32.2±0.8 years. Most (82.9%) were married, of Hausa ethnic group (47.4%) and practicing Christian faith (50%). Concerning level of compliance to health regimen, respondents demonstrated adequate compliance (cumulative mean =2.716). Compliance was observed to vary across place of last ANC visit (p < 0.001) Conclusion: The respondents demonstrated adequate compliance to health regimen which varied across place of last ANC visit.