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.
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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.
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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”