The majority of maternal and neonatal mortality occurred during the early postpartum period. This is mostly due to low postnatal care service utilization. There is a discrepancy of evidence on the effect status of antenatal care on postnatal care service utilization improvement. Therefore, this review study aims to estimate the pooled effect of antenatal care on postnatal care service utilization.
We searched from PubMed and Cochrane library database, Google Scholar, and Google. Initially, we found 265 articles; after duplication was removed and screened by the titles and abstracts’ relevance, 36 studies were considered to assess eligibility.
A total of 14 articles were included, with 15,765 participants for synthesis and meta-analysis. We found that a pooled estimate of women who had antenatal care was 1.53 times more likely to have postnatal care than those with no antenatal care.
The study concluded that low utilization of postnatal care services. Antenatal care service utilization has a positive effect on postnatal care service utilization. Policymakers and programmers better considered more antenatal care service use as one strategy of enhancing postnatal care service utilization.
Reference: https://www.hindawi.com/journals/jp/2020/7363242/
