Determinants of Short Birth Interval among Ever Married Reproductive Age Women Living in Dessie City Administration, Dessie, Ethiopia Community Based Unmatched Case Control Study

Abstract

Background; Birth interval refers to the time interval from one child’s birth date until the next child’s birth date. Birth intervals are generally low in Ethiopia. A short birth interval is a universal public health problem resulting in adverse maternal, neonatal and child outcomes. As far as my knowledge, there is no study done in Dessie city administration about determinants of short birth interval. Objective: This study assessed the determinants of short birth interval among ever married reproductive age mothers who live in Dessie city administration ,Ethiopia, March 08-25,2019. Methods and materials; community -based unmatched case-control study was employed on 218 cases, and 436 controls. Ever married reproductive age women who have at least two consecutive live births with birth interval of less than 3 years between the latest two successive live births and whose last delivery has been within the past five years prior to the survey as a case and those women with birth interval of 3–5 years as a control. A multistage sampling technique was employed on 30% of kebeles in Dessie city administration. Structured interviewer administered pre-tested questionnaire was used to collect data by trained 16 diploma nurses supervised by other 4 BSc nurses. The collected data was entered into Epi data 4.2 and analysis with SPSS version 22.Binary logistic regression with 95% Confidence interval at p<0.05 was used. Multi-collinearity was checked by standard error and Hosmer-Lemeshow’s test (p=0.75) was used to check model fitness. Result: In this study, that contraceptive use(AOR: 11.2, 95% CI (5.95-21.151)) ,breast fed duration(AOR=0.098, 95% CI (0.047-0.208)) ,age at first birth (AOR: 0.46, 95% CI (0.282- 0.761)) , preceding child sex(AOR= 0.36, 95% CI (0.166-0.793))and correctly know duration of optimum birth interval (AOR=0.45, 95% CI (0.245-0.811)) were independent determinants of short inter birth interval. Conclusion and recommendations: contraceptive use ,breast fed duration ,age at first birth, preceding child sex and correctly know duration of optimum birth interval were independent determinants of inter birth interval .The city health department focus on awareness creation and design strategies to encourage women to utilize modern contraceptive and to breast fed the baby