Adherence and barriers to key antenatal interventions among pregnant women in an urban district of Ghana: A cross-sectional study.

Objective: This study assessed Adherence and Barriers to Key Antenatal Interventions among Pregnant Women in an Urban District of Ghana. Methods: The study used a cross-sectional design to quantitatively assess the uptake and barriers to key interventions among 200 pregnant women who were selected through simple random sampling. Data was first entered into a Microsoft Excel sheet and exported to Stata version 16 in the same format. Results: The uptake of Sulfadoxine-Pyrimethamine for Intermittent Preventive Treatment in pregnancy (SP-IPTp) was found to be inadequate among 48.0%, those with adequate SP-IPTp uptake, 58.34% were in their third-trimester gestation, 8.33% were in their first trimester and 85.58% of third-trimester expectant mothers had inadequate uptake of SP-IPTp. The uptake of Iron and Folic Acid Supplementation (IFAS) was high (81.5%). Barriers influencing the uptake of ANC interventions were financial constraints (62.07%), lack of permission from work (19.54%), feeling healthy and therefore not needing ANC (10.34%), and distance to the hospital (8.05%). For SP-IPTp, the leading barrier was drug unavailability at health facilities (63.71%), forgetfulness (31.82%) and adverse reactions during previous pregnancies (29.55%) were the most frequently cited barriers to IFAS uptake. For deworming therapy, 94.12% of participants reported that the medication was not administered at ANC. Conclusion: This study makes significant contributions to maternal and child health research and policy by providing empirical evidence on the gaps between the coverage and actual uptake of key antenatal care (ANC) interventions such as SP-IPTp, IFAS, and deworming therapy among pregnant women in Ghana.