Awareness regarding Maternal Mortality in Adolescent Pregnancy among Students Studying in Selected Higher Secondary Schools of Kamrup Metro, Assam: A Cross Sectional Study

Every pregnant women hopes pregnancy to be a smooth process and expect to give birth safely. Globally, about 800 women die every day of preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth ; 20 per cent of these women are from India. (1) Assam has the highest maternal mortality ratio in India. (229 as against 122 at national level) and the 2nd highest infant mortality rate in india ( 44 infant deaths per 1000 live birth) as against 30 at the national average in 2017. (2). The objectives of the study were to assess awareness regarding maternal mortality in adolescent pregnancy among students studying in selected higher secondary schools of Kamrup Metro. A cross-sectional study was done among 236 students who were willing to participate from randomly selected five higher secondary schools in Kamrup Metro, Five higher secondary schools were selected randomly for the conduction of the study. If there are more than one section in each standard, then one section was taken randomly. From each selected class, the lottery method was used to select the students from the register. A pre- tested, predesigned self administered questionnaire was used to collect the data. The students were briefed before the questionnaire. The questionnaire were distributed to the randomly selected students using the attendance register. Data were analysed using the SPSS 22 Chi-square test were used to test the significance. It was found that out of 236 respondents, majority ie 169 (71.6 %) of the respondents having moderate awareness ( score ranging 6-25marks) and 35 (14.8 %) respondents have inadequate awareness and only 32 ( 13.6 %) respondents have adequate knowledge. The overall mean of the knowledge score is 15.8, with SD ±9.36 and SE ±0.61. There is significant association of the awareness scores regarding maternal mortality in adolescent pregnancy with education of the respondents (pless than0.01), occupation of the father (pless than0.05) and occupation of the mother (pless than0.001).