Asian Journal of Research in Medicine and Medical Science

Contraceptives prevent pregnancy generally among women and not among human immune virus infected women alone. The uptake of contraceptives among HIV-positive women is low in Nigeria, a country with high rates of HIV-infected children from maternal to child transmission. Effective linkages between the sexual and reproductive health and the HIV fields are essential to ensuring the reproductive rights of people living with HIV. This study assessed the reasons for the choice of contraceptives among HIV Infected women attending ART clinic at General Hospital Daura, Kastina state, Nigeria. It is a cross-sectional study design with concurrent mixed method of data collection, and random and purposive sampling techniques employed to choose respondents for the quantitative and qualitative components of the study respectively. An adapted structured interviewer-administered questionnaire was deployed to collect data from 186 women who had been on ART for at least 3months before the study. Focus group discussion was used to explore the reasons for the respondent’s choice of contraceptive utilisation. The study revealed a contraceptive prevalence rate of 37.6% among current users and 54.3% among those who ever used. Pills (OCP) was the commonest choice of method among respondents (55.7%). Knowing the method (88.6%) was the most common reason for the choice of contraceptive among the respondents. Contraceptive choices were found to be significantly associated with all quality of health services factors; access to contraceptives (P<0.001), counselling by health provider (P<0.001), provision of information on how to use contraceptives (P<0.001), assurance of confidentiality by healthcare provider (P<0.001) and availability of preferred method (P<0.001)

The study confirmed that the utilisation of contraceptives was low among the HIV-infected women and pills were the preferred contraceptive choice. Therefore, there is a need to prioritize the integration of family planning services with HIV care and support services while making efforts to remove the barriers to accessing different contraceptive methods to reduce the unmet needs of this group of women.