S V Nithya Susangi and A M N T Adikari
Wayamba University of Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka
Posters & Accepted Abstracts: Primary Health Care
Proper nutrition during infancy ensures better growth and development of infants. Sri Lanka represents stunting, wasting and under-weight prevalence of 5.7%, 10.3% and 20.2% respectively among infants at complementary feeding age. These figures make a great doubt about the effectiveness of nutrition interventions that have been conducted so far. Therefore, developing novel nutrition interventions and evaluating their effectiveness are of current importance in Sri Lanka. The aims of this study were to develop a hand-brochure on nutrition during complementary feeding and to evaluate its effectiveness as a nutrition intervention tool. The study was conducted in two phases. First phase was the development of the hand brochure and the second phase was the evaluation of the developed hand brochure. Information on time of initiating complementary feeding, nutritional importance of complementary feeding, importance and sources of macro and micro nutrients, hygienic practices during food preparation, introducing family foods, and extended breast feeding practices were included in the hand brochure using attractive pictorial format and simple language. Information needed to develop the hand brochure was gathered by referring currently available nutrition intervention tools at Maternal and Child Health (MCH) clinics and discussing with health-care professionals deal with infancy. The hand brochures were developed in A4 size (21cm*29.7cm) with three folds (6 sides). The evaluation was done as a quasi-experimental study using fifty-seven mothers of complementary feeding infants. A pre-intervention nutrition knowledge assessment was conducted using a knowledge assessing questionnaire. A post-intervention knowledge assessment was conducted four weeks after distributing hand-brochures using the same knowledge assessing questionnaire. The subjects who scored between 20-14, 10-13 and 0-9 for the knowledge assessing questionnaire during pre and post intervention knowledge assessments were categorized as to have â??goodâ?, â??moderateâ?, and â??weakâ? knowledge levels respectively. Mean scores of pre and post-intervention knowledge assessments were compared using dependent sample t-tests. Post-intervention mean knowledge scores of mothers of infants showed a significant improvement from pre-intervention mean knowledge scores (P<0.05).
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