Introduction: Eventhough the maternal health services has been scaled up in recent years adequate utilization of services has not been achieved yet and services provided varies from region to region. So this study has been planned to explore the differences in quality of service provision in rural and urban primary health centres .
Objectives : To assess the quality of services rendered to antenatal mothers in rural and urban primary health centres in Dharmapuri district.
Methodology : A community based cross-sectional study was done among 100 antenatal mothers in a selected rural and urban primary health centre area each, in Dharmapuri. A pre-validated semi-structured questionnaire was used to interview the Antenatal mothers. The data was entered in MS Excel and analyzed by SPSS 16.
Results : The mean age of Antenatal mothers in rural area was 23.3yrs with SD of 3.4yrs and in Urban area the mean age of AN mothers was 23.2 yrs with SD of 3.3yrs. 14% were teenage pregnancy both in Rural and Urban areas. Quality of the services was found to be better in rural areas compared to urban areas , with statistically significant rural-urban difference was seen in 1) Adequacy of antenatal visits with respect to their gestational age ( p value < 0.01 ),2) Information about their weight status regularly( p value <0.05), 3) Receiving Td injection during first antenatal visit ( p value <0.05), 4) counseling about referral hospital (p value < 0.05) and 5) Birth preparedness (p value < 0.05).