Background: Quality care encourages health seeking behaviors of clients, motivates health providers, safe guard's client's health and ensures sustainability of the programs, however no adequate data is available on mothers related to quality of antenatal care its effect in Ethiopia.
Objective:-To assess quality of antenatal care through client satisfaction, provider's competency and availability of basic and necessary equipment in ten selected health centers in Addis Ababa.
Methods:- A health center was selected by lottery system from each ten sub-cities. Data was collected from clients of antenatal care service, health providers and the ten health centers. For the exit interview, a total of 422 women were selected by proportion to size of clients of each health center. All the 20 health care providers working in the antenatal clinic were observed while 100 clients were examined. Simple observation using check list was made for availability of instruments and medical equipments necessary for antenatal care. Finally data was coded, cleaned, entered using EPI-6 and was analyzed using SPSS statistical software for windows.
Findings:-This study showed that overall satisfaction of client was as high as 89%. The likelihood of satisfaction from antenatal care service was lower among women above 34 years of age (Adj-OR = 0.10; 95% CI; 0.01, 0.73). This study also illustrated that higher proportion of health providers didn’t provide proper management, advice and information related to complication of pregnancy. Although health centers have basic structural medical equipments, most of the health institutions have no clinical management guidelines including weighting scale.
Conclusions:-Overall satisfaction of antenatal care is high, although health providers didn’t do proper management of antenatal care service, and health centers have no guideline of management of antenatal care.
Recommendation:- Regular in-service training on and management of women coming to health institution and on proper use of guidelines for management of health professionals working in antenatal care service is essential