Factors Influencing the Uptake of HIV Testing During Antenatal Care in Rural Uganda

Despite critics of the ‘opt-out’ policy surrounding HIV testing during antenatal care visits in Uganda suggesting that women may be deterred from seeking antenatal care at facilities with on-site testing, empirical evidence suggests the acceptability of HIV testing during antenatal care has been significantly increasing over the last decade. Furthermore, there is a disconnect between high rates of antenatal care and low rates of facility births implying that there are other reasons women use antenatal care besides to prepare for a facility delivery. The aim of this paper is to investigate the role HIV testing has in the high rates of antenatal care uptake in Uganda. A focused ethnographic study was undertaken in two areas of Kabarole district between the period of September 2009 and January 2010. Data collection consisted of in-depth interviews, focus groups and participant observation. Overall, 58 interviews were undertaken with new mothers and pregnant women, older women, and formal and informal health care providers. Four focus group discussions were undertaken with a total of 41 husbands. Data collection tools included semi-structured guidelines for both the interviews as well as the focus group discussions. Our findings revealed that HIV testing was an important motivator for women to seek antenatal care. There are three reasons for this: 1) knowledge of mother-tochild transmission and prevention has increased, 2) health care providers refuse to attend to women during childbirth who do not know their HIV status and who do not have proof of their HIV status in the form of an antenatal card, and 3) HIV testing during pregnancy is transforming into a societal expectation and is linked to notions of ‘good motherhood’. It appears that the two decade old HIV campaigns in Uganda have resulted in increased knowledge and awareness leading to a change in expectations and practice. HIV testing and having proof of their HIV status as another key motivator for seeking antenatal care may also help to explain the disconnect between high antenatal care rates and low rates of facility births. *Corresponding author: Zubia Mumtaz, Department of Public Health Sciences, 3-309 Edmonton Clinic Health Academy, Tel. 780.492.7709, Fax: 780.492.0364, Canada, E-mail: [email protected] Received January 05, 2013; Accepted January 27, 2013; Published February 03, 2013 Citation: Mumtaz Z, Merchant N, Levay A (2013) Factors Influencing the Uptake of HIV Testing During Antenatal Care in Rural Uganda. J Women’s Health Care 2: 121. doi:10.4172/2167-0420.1000121 Copyright: © 2013 Mumtaz Z, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.