Time to first antenatal care booking and its determinants among pregnant women in Ethiopia: survival analysis of recent evidence from EDHS 2019

BACKGROUND: Antenatal care is one of the components of the maternal and child continuum of care. Timely booking ANC during pregnancy is of utmost importance to guarantee the best possible health outcomes for women and children. Inappropriate timing of the first ANC booking is associated with poor pregnancy outcomes, including perinatal death, stillbirth, and early neonatal death. According to WHO focused ANC recommendation, every mother should start booking ANC within the first 12 weeks of gestational age. However, in developing countries, including Ethiopia, many pregnant mothers were not booking ANC at the recommended time. Thus, this study aims to assess the time to first ANC booking and its determinants in Ethiopia. METHODS: A survival analysis was conducted to determine time to first ANC booking among 3917 weighted study subjects. The data were extracted from EDHS 2019 using STATA version 17 software. A Kaplan Meier survivor curve was computed to estimate the time of first ANC booking. A Long-rank test was used to compare the difference in survival curves. Weibull Inverse Gaussian shared frailty model was used to identify significant predictors. On multivariable analysis, variables having a p-value of ≤ 0.05 are considered statistically significant. RESULTS: The overall median survival time was four months. The significant determinant of time to first ANC booking are residence (rural [ϕ = 1.111, 95CI: 1.060, 1.164), mother educational level (primary education [ϕ = 0.945, 95CI: 0.915, 0.977], secondary and above educational [ϕ = 0.857, 95CI: 0.819, 0.896]) and wealth index (middle [0.948 (ϕ = 0.948, 95CI: 0.911, 0.986) and rich [ϕ = 0.904, 95CI: 0.865, 0.945]) CONCLUSION: The median time for first ANC booking is 4 month, which is higher than the WHO recommended time. The timing of the first ANC booking in Ethiopia was mainly influenced by the residence of women, mother educational level, and wealth index. It is strongly recommended to expose mothers to educational materials and other awareness-creation campaigns, as well as to support disadvantaged women, such as the uneducated, poor, and those living in rural or remote areas.