Counselling practices during focused antenatal care are considered an effective strategy to improve pregnancy outcome. Using the Explanatory design of mixed method approach, 369 women who have ever attended antenatal care and gave birth in the health facilities, opinion leaders in the communities and practicing midwives within the Effutu Municipality were sampled randomly and purposively. Two research questions were formulated and were analysed using Mean, Standard Deviation and Spearman’s Correlation Coefficient. The study revealed that the general perception of women in the municipality was that counselling during FANC was not effective and that reasons for counselling implementation gaps were: poor communication, negative midwives’ attitudes, lack of knowledge and experience of midwives in counselling, poor time management and uncooperative client behaviour. The study recommended that Midwives, the ministry of health and the Ghana health service should improve accessibility to antenatal services and the municipal health directorate and the midwife should improve midwives’ knowledge and skills in antenatal counselling and focused antenatal services as a whole. Finally, a model was developed to improve counselling during focused antenatal care.
Keywords: Counselling practices, Counsellor, Focused antenatal care, Midwives
