Emergency contraception use and associated factors Among female undergraduate students in mizan-tepi University snnpr, south west ethiopia

Abstract

Introduction: - unintended pregnancy poses a major public health problem among female students at higher institution. One of the key interventions to reduce unintended pregnancy and unsafe abortion as outlined in the national youth strategy is availability of emergency contraception. Despite its availability in many countries emergency contraception has failed to have the desired impact on unintended pregnancy rates and its utilization is limited in higher institution. Identifying those factors associated with emergency contraception utilization is therefore, important to reduce incidence of unintended pregnancy and its complications among university girls. Objective: - The objective of the study was to assess emergency contraception use and associated factors among female students at Mizan-Tepi University, south west Ethiopia, 2014. Methods: - Institution based cross-sectional study design having both quantitative and qualitative methods were used to assess emergency contraception use and associated factors among regular female students of Mizan-Tepi University from March 15-25/ 2014. For quantitative study a twostage stratified sampling technique with Probabilities proportional to size of departments and year of study was used; finally study participants selected by simple random sampling technique. Selfadministered questionnaire was used to collect data and entered in to Epidata3.1 then exported to SPSS version 20:00 for analysis. Bivariate analysis was used to select variables associated with emergency contraception use and multivariate logistic regression also done to identify predictors of emergency contraception use. For the qualitative data Purposive and volunteer sampling techniques were applied and data analysis was done mainly based on the thematic approach. Result: - In this study a total of 438 female students were involved with 98.9 % response rate. Among those who had unprotected sex only 46.3% of them used emergency contraception. Lack of knowledge and fear of being seen by others were the main reasons given for not using emergency contraception. Respondents knowledge on emergency contraception [AOR: 3.248; 95% CI = 1.320, 7.988], age at first sex (>=20 years) [AOR: 4.048; 95% CI = 1.721, 9.524], history of pregnancy [AOR: 3.122; 95% CI = 1.346, 7.240] and Previous use of regular contraceptives [AOR: 5.019; 95% CI = 2.234, 11.274] were found to be predictors of emergency contraception use. Conclusion and Recommendation: - Generally the study showed that level of emergency contraception use was low when compared with higher risk of unintended pregnancy and respondent’s level of knowledge on emergency contraception, age at first sex, previous use of regular contraception and history of pregnancy were the major predictors of emergency contraception use. Therefore, designing strategies to enhance emergency contraception utilization by increasing female students’ level of awareness about sexual and reproductive health issues in general and emergency contraception specifically is recommended