Effect of Maternal Awareness regarding Antenatal Care on Newborn Health in Bangladesh

Introduction: New born care is an effective way to meet the baby's needs which mothers' have been achieved from antenatal care services. This service is extremely important during pregnancy to reduce neonatal and infant mortality and morbidity. Objectives: To determined the effects of newborn health regarding maternal' awareness with antenatal care in Bangladesh. Methods: The study was conducted by using descriptive and cross sectional design. This study was approved by the appropriate authority and informed consent forms were obtained from the participants. Four hundred forty two mothers completed three sets of questionnaires: 1) Socio-demographic, 2) Maternal Awareness and 3) Impact of Awareness. Content validity was done by the experts and internal consistency of these instruments was satisfactory with Cronbach's alpha over 0.74. Results: The mean age of the mother's was 24.77 ± 4.29 years and 57.9 percent of mother's has received four and more antenatal care visit and only 1.4 percent did not received antenatal care visit. Relationship between number of received antenatal care visit and socio demographic status on education (x2=-4.70, p<0.001), employment status (x2=7.57, p 0.006), monthly family income (x2=-4.14, p<0.001) and length of pregnancy (x2=6.40, p 0.012) were statistically significant by Chi-square test analysis. Differences between number of antenatal care visit and effects of newborn health regarding birth weight (t=11.199, p 0.024), type of first feeding (t=10.256, p 0.036), initiation of first feeding (t=12.149, p 0.016) and exclusive breast feeding (t=15.929, p 0.003) was significantly different by t-test analysis. Conclusion: The findings of this study were observed satisfactory. Further intervention study should use to represent the whole population which can help to improve good outcome for newborn health.