Background: Antenatal care services are the first steps towards ensuring the health of mothers and the newborn. This is the key component for achieving Millennium Development Goals by 2015. But India's performance continues to be poor in providing antenatal care services to its huge population, particularly in the rural areas.
Objective: To assess the determinants of utilization of antenatal services by rural beneficiaries in Lucknow, a district of north India.
Materials and methods: The study, cross-sectional in design, was conducted from August 2009 to July 2010. Multistage random sampling was used for selecting villages. A total of 352 recently delivered women were selected following systematic random sampling. Logistic regression was used to find out the determinants of three antenatal care services.
Results: Overall, 85.5% of the beneficiaries surveyed were found to receive at least three antenatal care services from any health facility. Community health centre was the most common source for such care. Significant difference was found between beneficiaries who took three antenatal care visits and who did not in terms of age, socio economic status, and timing of registration. On multiple regression, only age (OR = 2.107, 95% CI = 1.132 - 3.923) and timing of registration (OR = 2.817, 95% CI = 1.487 - 5.338) were found to be the predictors for three antenatal care visits.
Conclusion: Intervention should be focused on young and late registered women for ensuring sufficient care during pregnancy.
Keywords: Antenatal care; determinant; recently delivered women; rural India.