Assessment of Prevalence and Associated Factors of Preterm Birth at St Paul’s Hospital Millennium Medical College, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Abstract

Background: Preterm birth has been referring to as babies born alive before 37 weeks’ births include medical conditions of the mother or completed weeks or 259 days of gestation of pregnancy are completed.  Preterm birth is the leading cause of infant morbidity and mortality throughout the world.

Objective; To assess prevalence and associated factor of preterm births among mother who gave birth at St Paul’s Hospital Millennium Medical College, Addis Ababa Ethiopia, 2018.

Methods: Institutional based quantitative cross-sectional study design was conducted in maternity ward and emergency gynecology-obstetrics outpatient department among mothers who gave birth from June 01 –June 20, 2018 at St. Paul’s hospital millennium medical college. Data was entered into Epi-info version7 and export into SPSS versions 23.0 for analysis. Bivariate and multivariate logistic regressions were conducted to identify predictors of maternal satisfaction towards childbirth service by considering p-value less than 0.05.

Result: The study revealed that the prevalence of preterm birth at St. Paul’s hospital was   19.8%. The highest contributing maternal factor were history of pregnancy induced hypertension(PIH) and bleeding during pregnancy (AOR= 4.13 95%CI = 0.208,7.114) (AOR=4,001 95%CI 1.014,15.795) respectively; followed by urinary tract infection (UTI) (AOR=2.31195%CI 0.147,6.58) which all showed statistically significant association.

Conclusion and recommendation: the higher prevalence of preterm birth of ~20 % was highly associated with most likely preventable or minimal complications causes with regular Antenatal follow up. Pregnant mothers should be regularly screen for PIH, bleeding, UTI & PROM as it was revealed by the study these factors increased the risk of preterm delivery. In addition, improving maternal healthcare, community health education and awareness campaigns for service utilization may decrease the rate of preterm birth and its consequence.

Keywords: Preterm, Maternal, Fetal, neonatal, prevalence

DOI: 10.7176/JHMN/79-02

Publication date:August 31^st 2020