Abstract: Background: Effective contraception is one of the evidenced based requirements for prevention of maternal death. Long-Acting Reversible Contraception (LARC) is a sure cost effective contraception that is urgently needed in low resources settings where there are low contraceptive prevalence and high fertility and maternal mortality rate.
Objective: To assess the uptake of long-acting reversible contraceptive (LARC) among women attending the family planning clinic in Federal Medical Centre, Asaba as well as to review of the socio-demographic characteristics of the women who accepts LARC methods.
Methods: This was a retrospective descriptive study of women who attended family planning clinic at FMC, Asaba between 1st January, 2017 and 31st December 2019. Data was collected from the family planning register. The register was used to identify women, who accepted LARC between 1st January, 2017 and 31st December, 2019. Thereafter, their case notes were retrieved, analyzed using SPSS (IBM version 20) and results presented in frequencies, percentages and tables.
Results: A total of 1304 women attended family planning clinic at Federal Medical Centre, Asaba during the period of study. One thousand one hundred and sixty- five (1165) women accepted a modern method of contraception, had complete record and were used for this study. A total of eight hundred and forty- six (846; 72.6%) women accepted LARC method. Out of this, intra-uterine contraceptive device (IUCD) uptake was 437(51.7%) while implants uptake was 409(48.3%). The majority of the women who accepted LARC were between the ages 30-34years 298(35.2%). A greater proportion of the women were married 810(95.7%) while 29(3.4%) were single women. Over half of the women who accepted LARC had tertiary level of education. Uptake of LARC increased with increasing parity.
Conclusion: There was high uptake of LARC in this study with rate of 72.6% as well as a rising trend in its usage. The most commonly used LARC was copper IUCD (51.7%). However, adolesents, less educated and low parity women had poor uptake.
Indexed in Index Copernicus
