CONTRACEPTIVE CHOICES AMONG WOMEN ATTENDING FAMILY PLANNING CLINIC AT PLATEAU STATE SPECIALIST HOSPITAL (PSSH) JOS

Abstract

Background: Family planning helps everyone (women, children, men, families and
nations). Specifically, it protects women from unwanted pregnancies, thereby saving them
from high risk pregnancies or unsafe abortions. If all women could avoid high-risk
pregnancies, the number of maternal deaths could fall by one-quarter. Also other benefits
accruing from family planning methods include prevention from cancers, sexually
transmitted infections including HIV/AIDS.
Objective: The focus of this study therefore, is to find out the pattern and factors
influencing contraceptives choices among women attending family planning clinic in
Plateau State Specialist Hospital Jos.
Design: A total of 138 clients who consented were recruited consecutively at the family
planning clinic at PSSH, Jos. Individual counselling on the various contraceptive methods
was done for all women presenting at the family planning clinic who met the inclusion
criteria by the researcher to enable them make informed choices. Questionnaire was
administered by the researcher using the face to face interview approach.. This contained
the socio- demographic data, history of contraceptive use, past medical history and
counselling. The researcher measured the height, weight and blood pressure of all those
that were enrolled in the study. All the information obtained from the questionnaire entered
into the computer. The data was analyzed and presented in form of tables ,proportions and
percentages. Chi-square test was used to test for significance. Significance was assigned if
the P-value was <0.05.

Result: This study shows that most (90% )of the clients were between the ages of 21-40
years. Over 70% of the clients had primary and secondary education. Most ( 87%) of the
clients were Christians while 13% were Muslim. All the clients were married. Most
(94.2%) of the clients were from monogamous homes. Most (80% ) of the clients had
parities between1-6 and 96.3% of the clients had family sizes between 1-9. Over 97% of
the husbands of clients had attained at least primary level of education. All the husband of
clients were employed while only 64% of the clients were employed. The commonest
reasons given for the preferred methods by clients were; ease of use (29%), long lasting
(18.8%), safety (15.9%) and fear of complications (12.4%) .The commonest source of
contraceptive information for clients was through health workers (76.8%), followed by
friends (18.1%) and through the media(5.1%). The commonly used contraceptive method
was injectable (40.6%) IUCD (35.5%), implant (10.9%) and oral pills (10.9%), BTL
(1.4%) and male condom (0.7%). The factors that were found to significantly affect
contraceptive use in this study were, the gender of the children in the families, parity of the
clients, family size and type of marriage, history of hypertension and effective counselling.
Conclusions: Improved access, availability to contraceptives and effectiveness of
contraceptive counselling can strongly increase their uptake. The rising use of modern
methods suggests that family planning programs have made significant progress in offering
contraceptives that are both acceptable and accessible to users in developing countries.

CONTRACEPTIVE CHOICES AMONG WOMEN ATTENDING FAMILY PLANNING CLINIC AT PLATEAU STATE SPECIALIST HOSPITAL (PSSH) JOS