Prevalence of Teenage Pregnancy among Pregnant mothers Presenting at Hoima Regional Referral Hospital during the Covid-19 Pandemic (2020 to 2021)
Globally, it is estimated that every year, an estimated 21 million girls aged 15 to 19 years and 2 million girls agedunder 15 years become pregnant. This poses a great public health concern due to its short and longer-term healthand social consequences. Though teenage pregnancy had poor maternal and perinatal health outcomes, itsmagnitude and associated factors were not well understood in the study area. Thus, this study sought to determinethe prevalence of teenage pregnancy and associated factors among pregnant mothers presenting at Hoima RegionalReferral Hospital, Uganda (HRRH). A hospital based retrospective cross-sectional descriptive study was done inJanuary 2022 on 300 pregnant mothers who had attended antenatal care between July 2020 and June 2021. Datawere collected using a pre tested questionnaire, entered in computer and analyzed using SPSS version 25. Chisquared analysis was used to determine strength of association between dependent and independent variables and ap value of ≤ 0.05 was considered to be significant. The prevalence of teenage pregnancy in HRRH was 30.0%. Beingunmarried (X2=82.31, p=<0.001), Secondary education and below (X2=97.62, p=<0.001), Christian religion(X2=14.29, p=<0.001), and contraceptive non-use (X2=38.09, p=<0.001) were found to have statistically significantassociations with teenage pregnancy. This study found that there is a high prevalence of teenage pregnancy in thestudy area. Secondary education and below, contraceptive non-use, and being a Christian were found to have astatistically significant association with teenage pregnancy.