Ameliorating Awareness and Practice of Pregnancy Care Components Through a Community-Based Intervention Program: A Comparison of Baseline and Endline

Background: India still accounts for more than 20% of global maternal deaths. Out of which a large percentage can be prevented with timely action.For the same, Government of India is determined and launching various national schemes. However, at individual level awareness and utilization of maternal health care services is vital for successful implantation of these programmes.

Objective: To analyse the effectiveness of the intervention and to identify the factors that influence knowledge and practices during pregnancy.

Methods: This study uses the data of baseline and endline done to analyse the impact of intervention in Bihar and Maharashtra among married women (15-24 years). Both the baseline and endline followed multistage sampling procedure. The villages/wards for data collection were chosen by using Probability Proportional
to Size (PPS) technique. For analysis, awareness and practice indices were made using pregnancy care indicators. Chi-square between socio-demographic variables with indices was calculated, where a value <0.05 was considered as significant.

Results: A considerable improvement from 31% to 37.1% was reported in the ‘High’ category of awareness index from baseline to endline. Moreover for practice index, 39.2% of women at baseline had poor practices related to pregnancy care which reduced to 19.6% by endline. Bihar has more number of women in the ‘Low’
category in both baseline and endline as compared to Maharashtra. Socio-demographic indicators including age at marriage, parity, household income, education, education of the husband and employment status of women showed affirmative trend and significant association with the awareness and practice indices.

Conclusions: The community based intervention package had a positive impact on the awareness and practice component of pregnancy care among women. Moreover, other socio-demographic indicators are also substantial for affirmative outcome.