Pregnant women’s points of view regarding to not receiving prenatal care, 2001

Introduction: It is widely believed that, if women want to have healthy pregnancies and infants they must use the prenatal care that is essential. This study investigated the obstacles to prenatal care in women referring to maternity hospitals in Kerman. Methods: This study is a descriptive study, which was carried out to study the view of 400 pregnant women toward obstacles to prenatal care. In this study a predesigned questionnaire was used for data collection and descriptive statistics, ANOVA and Kruskal Wallis tests were used for data analysis. In this study obstacles were divided into three subscales of system barriers, provider barrier and patient’s barriers. Results: This study showed that, in system barriers the highest percent (58.7%) belongs to the lack of transportation and other barriers were inappropriate place for providing prenatal care (4.31%) and long time waiting for receiving care (9.30%). In provider barriers the highest percent (2.7%) belongs to in adequate reach and follow up. The result also shows that in patient barrier the highest percent (35.1%) belongs to unwanted pregnancy. The result related to comparison barriers with some demographic variables showed some significant differences. Conclusion: Because prenatal care prevents problems during pregnancy and delivery so we have to reduce the obstacles that result from this study.