Introduction:

Prenatal care consists of continuous monitoring of pregnancy, and it has been established that a greater number of prenatal care visits is associated with a reduction in obstetric morbidity and mortality.

Objective:

The present research aims to determine the relationship between prenatal care and pregnancy complications.

Materials and methods:

Observational cross-sectional analytical study, from which 206 hospitalized patients were selected from the Hospital General IESS Los Ceibos who underwent an objective survey and subsequently clinical records were reviewed to verify the information collected.

Results:

It was observed that 94% of the patients had more than 5 prenatal care visits, 48% of whom had higher education and 90% resided in urban areas. Using the Chi-Square test, it was found that there is an important dependence between the number of prenatal care visits and obstetric complications, mainly perinatal complications (χ2-calc=2.3991), the most common being premature rupture of membranes, followed by postpartum (χ2-calc=2.1719) and gestational complications with less statistical significance (χ2-calc=2.0039).

Conclusions:

The results obtained through this study highlights that adequate prenatal care reduces the incidence of complications during the gestational and postpartum stages.

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