The replacement of the traditional antenatal care service model with focused antenatal care (FANC) has been viewed with mixed feelings by skilled birth attendants. This study therefore, assessed skill birth attendants’ perception and uptake of focused antenatal care at University of Benin Teaching Hospital, Benin City. A descriptive cross-sectional design that utilized convenient sampling to recruit 229 participants comprising of doctors, midwives and nurses from the various obstetrics departments participated in the study. Consent was obtained from the participants and was voluntary. A semi-structured questionnaire with a reliability of 0.72 was used for data collection. Data were analysed using frequencies, percentages and chi-square with the aid of Statistical Package for Social Sciences version 21. Results revealed that 82.4% of the respondents had good knowledge of FANC, while 69.2% of the respondents used FANC, only 2.4% had wrong perception of it usage. Moreover, 48.8% of the respondents had poor level of FANC uptake, 25.6% of respondents had fair uptake of FANC, while 25.6% have good level of its uptake. In addition, a significant association was found between professionals and uptake of focused antenatal care among the skilled birth attendants, while no significant association found between perception and uptake of focused antenatal care among the skilled birth attendants.It is therefore concluded that skilled birth attendants’ knowledge is high and they had positive and good perception to focused antenatal care however their uptake is poor.
Keywords: Antenatal Care, maternal mortality and skilled birth attendant., pregnancy
