KNOWLEDGE AND PRACTICE OF CERVICAL CANCER SCREENING AMONG WOMEN VISITING SPECIALIST HOSPITAL JALINGO, TARABA STATE
Abstract
Over the past several years, the incidence of cervical cancer in Nigeria has been on increase that is mainly attributed to lack of awareness and ineffective screening and prevention strategies employed. Meanwhile, in Taraba State, women’s knowledge of cervical cancer is very limited. It has been demonstrated that the vast majority of women had not heard of cervical cancer and even more knew nothing about cervical cancer screening. It was in line with this back drop this paper assessed knowledge and practice of cervical cancer screening among women visiting specialist hospital Jalingo. The design adopted was a cross-sectional survey method and data collected were analyzed using descriptive statistics. The results showed that the sampled women visiting specialist hospital Jalingo have good knowledge of cervical cancer screening, but their ignorance about the screening, costs of the screening, lack of interest about the screening and poor attitude of the health care workers hindered them from accessing the cervical cancer screening service; it further showed that majority of the women visiting specialist hospital though have good knowledge of cervical cancer screening, but have little or low level of its practicability; the paper further identified ignorance of women about cervical cancer screening; expensive costs of the screening, lack of interest of women about the screening as the major challenges/barriers to accessibility of cervical cancer screening among women visiting specialist hospital Jalingo, Taraba State. It is therefore recommended that: more awareness on the need to educating women on the usage of the screening in order not to be ignorance of the cervical cancer screening. In addition, government should develop and incorporate into the National Health Insurance Scheme, a policy on free screening for cervical cancer since the high cost of the screening was found to be high among study participants.
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