An Analysis on Antenatal care visits made by Expectant mothers in Uganda: A case study of MK clinic in Mbarara District
Abstract
The objective of this study was to analyse Antenatal Care visits made by women at MK Clinic in Mbarara district for the period 2016 to 2018. The assessment was based on monthly data collected from MK Clinic through Marie stopes and it consists of 36 records on voucher visits and non-voucher visits. The analysis was done using time series approach based on Autoregressive Intergrated Moving Averages (ARIMA).
The results obtained show that the distribution of Antenatal Care visits of voucher and non-voucher visits were stationary. The non-voucher visits and voucher visits were modeled using AR(4,9),AR(9,15) for non-voucher visits and ARIMA(1,0,1),ARIMA(3,0,3) for voucher visit with the first term representing the autoregressive lags, second term representing the level of differencing and third term representing the moving average lags. The forecasted values for the next six months were 98, 87,81,90,91 and 92 for voucher visits, 76, 75,66,68,63 and 66 for non-voucher visits.
The study recommends that the higher number of voucher visits in the results points to the need for more subsidization of ANC. This will enable many mothers especially the low income ones to access and increase the demand for high quality health services and also the increasing number of voucher visits noted in the forecasts calls for the maintenance of the voucher project intervention.