Abstract

Family planning, a pillar of safe motherhood is known for its benefits including limiting
unwanted pregnancies, reducing infant and maternal mortality and morbidity. Evidence
exists that spacing pregnancies by at least two years apart using family planning significantly
reduces up to 35% of maternal deaths, 13% of child mortalities and up to 25% of under –five
mortalities. Despite its efforts to spur family planning utilization, Uganda has one of the
lowest contraceptive prevalence rates in the region. This is coupled with high maternal
mortality ratio at 336 per 100,000 live births and neonatal mortality rates 27/1000 live
births. Yet still, Uganda’s efforts to improve contraceptive uptake to about 50% by 2020 is
still peculiar. Therefore, this research aimed to explore factors which influence utilization of
FP among women of reproductive age (15-49) attending Fort Portal regional referral hospital
in Fort Portal district. A cross-sectional descriptive study design was used and a total of 292
randomly selected women of reproductive age (15-49) at Fort Portal Regional Referral
Hospital were enrolled into the study. Data on current use of family planning and related
factors was collected using a researcher administered questionnaire, checked for
completeness and analyzed using the statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) software
version 25. Factors influencing family planning utilization were determined using logistic
regression analysis and Qui square test while statistical significance was determined at pvalue≤
0.05 and 95% confidence interval. The prevalence of contraceptive utilization was
29.79%. Our results indicated that age, marital status, parity, number of living children, age
of the youngest child, time to have the next child, mode of delivery, partner discussion about
family planning and female approval of family planning use were important predictors of
family planning utilization at bivariate logistic regression analysis while only the age of the
youngest child and expected time to have another child significantly influenced family
planning utilization at multivariate regression analysis.