RESEARCH ARTICLE Open Access What he knows about her and how it affects her? Husband’ s knowledge of pregnancy complications and maternal health care utilization among tribal population in Maharashtra, India Suresh Jungari 1* and Balram Paswan 2 Abstract Background: Husbands’ knowledge and awareness of pregnancy complications have a positive impact on their wives’ utilization of maternal health care services. In this study, we examined whether husbands’ knowledge and awareness of pregnancy complications can serve as determinants of maternal health service utilization among wives from the tribal population. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted in the rural Gadchrioli district of Maharashtra, India, during November 2014–March 2015. This study included a representative population-based sample of 385 men whose wives had given birth in last 2 years at the age of 15–49 years. A multistage sampling strategy was adopted to select the respondents. Univariate, bivariate, and binary logistic regression analyses were applied to examine the association between men’s knowledge and maternal health service utilization. Results: The result revealed that an increase in husbands’ education level increased the wives’ utilization of antenatal (ANC) care services. The type of tribe also contributed to significant differences in ANC utilization (OR: 2.64; 95% CI: 0.847–8.24). Regarding standard of living, husbands who were poor were 22% less likely than husbands in the rich category to report the utilization of ANC by their wives. Men with partial or complete knowledge of pregnancy, childbirth, and postpartum complications were more likely to utilize all maternal health services by their wives. Conclusions: The wives are of men who aware of complications during pregnancy and childbirth are more likely to use maternal health services. Therefore, educating and empowering men about pregnancy complications will contribute to the reduction in maternal and neonatal deaths. Keywords: Husbands’ awareness, Maternal health care utilization, Tribal women, Complication knowledge * Correspondence: sureshjungariiips@gmail.com 1 Interdisciplinary School of Health Sciences, Saritribai Phule Pune University, Pune, Maharashtra 411007, India Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © The Author(s). 2019 Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. Jungari and Paswan BMC Pregnancy and Childbirth (2019) 19:70 https://doi.org/10.1186/s12884-019-2214-x