Effect Of Community Health Strategy On Selected Maternal And Child Health Outcomes In Mwingi West Sub -County, Kitui County, Kenya

ABSTRACT

In Kenya, maternal and under-five mortality rates are high at 510/100 000 live births and 74/1000 live births respectively. This is attributed to poor Maternal and Child Health (MCH) outcomes reported across the country. In Mwingi, 38% of women do not seek Focused Antenatal Care (FANC), 55% deliver without Skilled Birth Care (SBC), 47.3% do not ensure their children complete immunization program, and 55.5% of infants are not exclusively breastfed. Since inception of Community Health Strategy (CHS) in Kenya, intervention effect on MCH outcomes in rural semi-arid regions such as Mwingi is not known. Specific objectives of this study were to establish effect of CHS on; FANC coverage, SBC utilization, Infant Vaccination Coverage (IVC), Exclusive Breastfeeding (EBF), and utilization of modern Postpartum Family Planning (PPFP) methods in Mwingi West sub-county. The study design was a pretest-post-test experiment with intervention and control sites. Mwingi West and Mwingi North sub-counties were intervention and control sites respectively. Participants in intervention and control sites received MCH care under CHS intervention and the standard MCH care in Kenya respectively. In each site, a baseline and 2 post-intervention surveys were conducted with each survey having a sample size of 422 participants. Data was collected using a structured questionnaire. Main respondents were women with a child aged 9-12 months. Both purposive and simple random sampling methods were employed. In the intervention arm; women at end term survey were 1.7 times more likely to seek ANC services for at least 4 times compared to baseline survey (Adj. OR 1.717,95%CI: 1.464-2.014, P