A comparative study on the role of antenatal care services and child care at various rural and tribal villages, Adilabad, Telangana state

Background: Reproductive, maternal, newborn and child health is one of the four categories of the universal health coverage indicators under sustainable development goals target 3.9: family planning, antenatal care (minimum 4 visits), with skilled attendants at birth, full child immunization coverage, and health seeking behavior for suspected child pneumonia1 . Achievement under millennium development goals shows that in developing countries like India, mostly in tribal villages continue to face the greatest challenges in improving the maternal and child health struggling with a combination of poor coverage and quality of health care services and public health interventions. The hard to reach tribal areas face obstacles in ensuring universal access to sexual, reproductive health services2 . The indicators showed lower performance among the tribal communities as seen with most of the health indicators. Poverty, low literacy and poor nutritional status of reproductive age women give rise to poor maternal and child health outcomes along with lack of healthcare delivery facilities lead poor maternal health indicators3 . Methods: A comparative study was conducted on 243 randomly selected mothers who have children less than 7years in rural and tribal villages (150 and 93 respectively). This is community based cross-sectional study and done by using a pre-tested structured questionnaire for data collection at Shanthapur , a rural village and various tribal villages, at an average 25kms away from Adilabad town from Jan-October 2019. Analysis was done using SPSS for windows version 16, Microsoft excel and Open epi website. Result: Out of 243 study subjects, 85% (206) of the study subjects were registered for the antenatal services. The mean age of mother at pregnancy, female literacy, birth order, number of antenatal visits, person conducting delivery, place of delivery, birth weight of child, number of breastfeeding per day, exclusive breastfeeding, total stoppage of breastfeeding ,baby hospitalization due to sickness, weight per age and height per age of the child are statistically significant(p<0.05) between the rural and tribal study subjects . Conclusion and Recommendation: This study revealed that utilization of ANC services and child care services are far better by rural women than the tribal women. The role of antenatal care and child care being influenced by difficulties of accessibility, availability of these services at tribal areas are exposed from this study