Zeitschrift für Frauengesundheit
Offener Zugang

Abstrakt

Knowledge Attitude and Utilization of Emergency Contraception among Health Science and Medical Students of Arba Minch University, 2015

Yohannes Fekadu

Introduction: Emergency contraception refers to contraceptive methods that can be used by women to prevent an unwanted pregnancy in the first few days after unprotected intercourse or contraceptive accident such as leakage/slippage of condom. It is important to prevent unwanted pregnancy and there by induced abortion. There for this study aimed to assess the knowledge attitude and practice of emergency contraceptive among Arba Minch University health science students.

Methods: Cross-sectional quantitative study was conducted from July 21, 2017 among female health science and medicine students of Arba Minch University. Self-administered structured and pre-tested questioner was used to obtain information from 216 study participants who were selected by population proportional systematic random sampling technique. After data collection the data was coded, entered and analyzed by using SPSS version 20.0. Binary logistic regression was fitted with forward stepwise method and significance was determined at p-value<0.05.

Result: The study showed that, 95.9% of the university female students had heard about emergency contraceptive; 87.4% of them identified the correct timing of use (72 hours). 84.8% students support the idea of making available emergency contraceptives for all females, 88.2% respondents said they are willing to use emergency contraceptive if need arises and 88.2% said they will recommend emergency contraceptive for other females if need arises. And also 58.8% of the respondents have ever practiced emergency contraceptive, of which 55.7% were used oral pills, 18.4% were used intra uterine contraceptive device. There is significant relation between use of emergency contraception and the level of class they are attending (class year), residence, knowledge about emergency contraceptives, attitude towards EC and parental communication.

Conclusion and recommendations: The level of knowledge, their attitude and practice of emergency contraceptive among students was high compared to other studies, further to increase this has to focus on information communication with in the school and families.