Journal of Emerging Trends in Economics and Management Sciences: Home

Abstract:
Maternal healthcare services is the promotion of women?s health and other preventive maternal healthcare practice which should start before birth, during intrauterine life and extends throughout different phases of lives in order to sustain their reproductive health in general. The study was conducted to determine the socio-cultural determinants of maternal healthcare services uptake among women attending antenatal clinic in General Hospital Ilorin, Kwara State. The survey research design was adopted for the study. The study population consisted of 357 pregnant women out of which 120 pregnant women were randomly sampled. Structured questionnaire validated and tested for reliability was used for data collection. Data collected were sorted, coded and analysed using SPSS software version 20.0.Two hypotheses were formulated and tested at 0.05 level of significance. The instrument used was questionnaire tagged ?Perception of pregnant women questionnaire? and it had a reliability coefficient of 0.706. The null hypotheses were analysed with Analyses of Variance (ANOVA). Results of the study revealed that there was no significant difference between educational status of the pregnant women and perception of maternal healthcare services (p< 0.005) and there was no significant difference between culture and the perception of maternal healthcare services (p< 0.005). The study concluded that educational status and culture of pregnant women do not make a difference on their perception of maternal health care services in General Hospital Ilorin. It was therefore recommended that government should intensify on her efforts to get pregnant women informed of maternal health care services through campaigns on the mass media. Also, maternal healthcare practitioners should learn to communicate well to all pregnant women regardless of their culture.

Keywords: Socio-cultural, determinants, uptake, maternal healthcare services, women

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