Antenatal Care (ANC): Objectives, Benefits and Importance
Definition of Antenatal Care (ANC):
Prenatal care, also known as antenatal care is a type of preventive healthcare with the goal of providing regular check-ups that allow doctors or midwives to treat and prevent potential health problems throughout the course of the pregnancy while promoting healthy lifestyles that benefit both mother and child.
Systemic supervision (examination and advice) of a woman during pregnancy which should be of a regular and periodic nature in accordance with the principles laid down or more frequently according to the need of the individual is called antenatal care.
Antenatal care comprises of:
- Careful history taking and examinations,
- Advice given to the pregnant woman.
Purposes of Antenatal Care (ANC):
It includes-
- To screen the ‘high risk’ cases.
- To prevent or to detect and treat at the earliest any complications.
- To ensure continued medical surveillance and prophylaxis.
- To educate the mother about the physiology of pregnancy and labour by demonstrations, charts and diagrams so that fear is removed and psychology is improved.
- To discuss with the couple about the place, time, and mode of delivery, provisionally and care of the newborn.
- To motivate the couple about to the need of family planning and also appropriate advice to couple seeking medical termination of pregnancy.
Aims or Objectives of Antenatal Care:
All the major objectives or aims of antenatal care have mentioned in the below:
- The objective is to ensure a normal pregnancy with delivery of a healthy baby from a healthy mother.
- It maintenance the health of the mother during pregnancy.
- It promotes mental, physical, and social well-being of mother and child.
- It ensures delivery of a full-term healthy baby.
- It helps to detect high-risk cases and minimize risks by taking appropriate management.
- It prevents the development of complications through health education, adequate nutrition, exercise, vitamin intake, and appropriate medical and pharmaceutical intervention.
- It teaches the mother about child care, nutrition, sanitation, and hygiene.
- It helps to decrease maternal and infant mortality and morbidity.
- It removes the stress and worries of the mother regarding the delivery process.
- Advice family planning and motive the couple about the need for family planning.
- It provides information on pregnancy and birth and discuss with the couple about the place, time, and mode of the delivery provisionally and care of the newborn.
- It ensures continued medical surveillance and prophylaxis.
Benefits and Importance of Antenatal Care:
- To screen out high risk cases.
- Detection of high risk factors.
- Regular supervision of pregnancy.
- Antenatal care is said to be the strategy, the intra-natal care is the tactics in obstetrics.
- To make the patient realize that the pregnancy is a physiological process & to give psychological support.
Maria Khatun Mona is a Founder and Editor of Nursing Exercise Blog. She is a Nursing and Midwifery Expert. Currently she is working as a Registered Nurse at Evercare Hospital, Dhaka, Bangladesh. She has great passion in writing different articles on Nursing and Midwifery. Mail her at “maria.mona023@gmail.com”