Impacts of health care providers’ characteristics on their assessment regarding the adequacy of adolescent sexual and reproductive health services in Swaziland

Background: At the present time, there are more than a billion of adolescents living in the developing countries. As they grow up, their circumstances and situations are quite different from that of their parents and their health care providers as well, with greater access to formal education, increasing need of technological skills such as computer, the more advanced cellular phones and internet literacy, and more exposure to new ideas through media, telecommunications and other avenues. These lead to change of environment and other factors that might influence adolescents towards taking decisions in regard to their sexual and reproductive health. On the other hand, it also raises curiosity to the health care providers as they expect them to go through their path of experiences hence that does not happen in most cases.

Objective: This study sought to assess the adequacy of adolescent sexual and reproductive health services from the health care providers’ perspective, to determine health care providers’ characteristics associated with their assessment regarding the adequacy of adolescent sexual and reproductive health services as well as to determine factors and perceived barriers to the provision of adolescent sexual and reproductive health services.

Methods: A cross-sectional survey was conducted among 196 health care providers in 5 purposively selected healthcare facilities using self-administered, pre-tested structured questionnaires. Descriptive statistics, bivariate statistics; independent-samples t-test and one-way ANOVA, Pearson correlation and multiple regression analysis were conducted to drive impacts and associations of health care providers’ assessment regarding adequacy of adolescent sexual and reproductive health services.

Results: The majority of respondents were nurses (87%), followed by physicians and nurse assistants (7% and 6%, respectively). Bivariate results showed that level of education on health care providers’ assessment regarding the adequacy of adolescent sexual and reproductive health services was statistically significant (p = 0.03). The results were also found statistically significant (p = 0.01) on health care providers’ specialty on their assessment regarding adequacy of adolescent sexual and reproductive health services. There was a statistically significant weak positive correlation (r = 0.141, p = 0.039) between health care providers’ perceptions on their assessment regarding adequacy of adolescent sexual and reproductive health services in Swaziland. When a multiple regression analysis was conducted, nurse practitioners and obstetrician among the other groups were statistically significant at (p = 0.012 and p = 0.036, respectively). Another significant predictor of the outcome variable was religion, the Roman Catholic group was statistically significant (p = 0.019) when compared to the other religious groups. Multiple regression analysis results showed 6% of the variances in healthcare providers’ assessment regarding adequacy of adolescent sexual and reproductive health services were explained by specialty and religion.

Conclusion: There is a need to improve the curriculum of health care providers in Swaziland in order to address issues of adolescent sexual and reproductive health services. There is also a need to further health care providers training so that they can be able to specialize in different field.