الفهرس 
IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Pregnancy and childbirth are special events in women’s lives, and indeed, in the lives of their families. Although pregnancy is not a disease but a normal physiological process, it is associated with certain risks to health and survival for both the woman and the infant she bears. Women who die from maternal causes are in the prime of their lives and are responsible for the health and wellbeing of their families. So, their deaths represent a drain on all developmental efforts and consider a tragedy with major consequences for the whole family.
Antenatal care is a preventive obstetric health program aims at optimizing maternal-fetal outcome, through regular monitoring of pregnancy. It clearly presents opportunity for reaching pregnant women with a number of an intervention that may be vital to the women’s and infant’s health and wellbeing. Maternity nurses play an important role to improve the quality of ANC through the consistent use of the central elements of the nursing process, which include assessment, nursing diagnosis, planning, intervention and evaluation.
In many developing countries the majority of women go through pregnancy and childbirth without any assistance from formally trained healthcare providers. Relatively little is known about factors that influence a pregnant woman’s decisions about initiating and continuing antenatal care. These factors could be classified into; demographic and biological; socioeconomic; cultural characteristics; health status; psychosocial; health beliefs and client satisfaction; as well as organizational characteristics and quality of the health provision system. Therefore, this study was carried out to explore the factors associated with pregnant women’s lack of attendance at antenatal clinics.
The study was conducted at 4 postpartum units affiliated to El-Shatby Maternity University Hospital, Dar-Esmail Maternity Hospital, Gamal Abdel-Nasser Hospital and Dar El-Welada Hospital. It included a convenient sample of 400 women who were in the immediate postpartum period and had less than 4 antenatal visits during the course of pregnancy.