Publications

Family planning, a pillar of safe motherhood is known for its benefits including limitingunwanted pregnancies, reducing infant and maternal mortality and morbidity. Evidenceexists that spacing pregnancies by at least two years apart using family planning significantlyreduces up to 35% of maternal deaths, 13% of child mortalities and up to 25% of under –fivemortalities. Despite its efforts to spur family planning utilization, Uganda has one of thelowest contraceptive prevalence rates in the region. This is coupled with high maternalmortality ratio at 336 per 100,000 live births and neonatal mortality rates 27/1000 livebirths. Yet still, Uganda’s efforts to improve contraceptive uptake to about 50% by 2020 isstill peculiar. Therefore, this research aimed to explore factors which influence utilization ofFP among women of reproductive age (15-49) attending Fort Portal regional referral hospitalin Fort Portal district. A cross-sectional descriptive study design was used and a total of 292randomly selected women of reproductive age (15-49) at Fort Portal Regional ReferralHospital were enrolled into the study. Data on current use of family planning and relatedfactors was collected using a researcher administered questionnaire, checked forcompleteness and analyzed using the statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) softwareversion 25. Factors influencing family planning utilization were determined using logisticregression analysis and Qui square test while statistical significance was determined at pvalue≤0.05 and 95% confidence interval. The prevalence of contraceptive utilization was29.79%. Our results indicated that age, marital status, parity, number of living children, ageof the youngest child, time to have the next child, mode of delivery, partner discussion aboutfamily planning and female approval of family planning use were important predictors offamily planning utilization at bivariate logistic regression analysis while only the age of theyoungest child and expected time to have another child significantly influenced familyplanning utilization at multivariate regression analysis.