Reproductive health needs and service utilization among youths in West Badewacho Woreda, Hadiya Zone, South Ethiopia

Abstract

Youths are facing different sexual and reproductive health problems. Most health services for youth are designed for adults and do not always have favorable conditions to meet the special needs of youths. Also, youths have been characterized by low sexual and reproductive health service utilization. Identifying and integrating young people preferences and needs regarding health facility helps better to serve the youth. Sexual and reproductive health needs and service utilization among youths in West Badewacho Woreda, Hadiya Zone, South Ethiopia was assess. A cross sectional study was conducted from 1st to 30th March, 2014 in West Badewacho Woreda, Hadiya Zone, South Ethiopia. A simple random sampling technique was used and total sample size was 658 youths. Data were entered into epi data 3.1 and exported to Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 20. Descriptive statics for age and family size, proportion for categorical variables, bivarate and multivariate logistic regression analysis were performed. Total of 640 subjects participated in the study and yielded 97.3% response rate. Out of total participants, 25.8% never had sex. From the total respondents, 76.3% need at least one component of sexual and reproductive health services. During multivariate analysis, sex, age, knowledge about reproductive health, participation in peer education, youth educational status and never had sex were predictors to have reproductive health service need. Out of the total participants, only 29.4% youths utilized reproductive health services in the last one year. In multivariate analysis, never had sex (AOR 3.080, 95% CI [1.918 to 4.944]), never heard about sexual and reproductive health (AOR = 2.016, 95% CI [1.308 to 3.106]) and had need to reproductive health services (AOR = 8.564, 95% [4.080 to 17.977]) were predictors to sexual and reproductive health service utilization. Youths have imprecise sexual and reproductive health knowledge. In contrast to the huge sexual and reproductive health needs, the services provided by the nearby health facility are far from addressing the needs, even if the services were available, its unfriendliness to youths resulted in less utilization of the available services.