Knowledge and practices of nurses on use of nutrition components of the road to health booklet in Giyani Primary Health Care Facilities, Mopani District.

Abstract

Background: The Road to Health Booklet (RtHB) is critical for children's health, development, and growth, because children aged 5 and younger are vulnerable to malnutrition and infectious diseases. RtHB provides health records for prevention, risk identification, curative health interaction activities, health promotion information, parenting empowerment opportunities, and a communication tool for health services. Lack of awareness, understanding of the content and completion criteria, as well as poor or partial use, are among the challenges that nursing personnel face when using child health records or RtHB (WHO, 2018).Objectives: The aim of this study is to assess the knowledge and practices of nursing staff regarding the use of nutrition components of RtHB in Greater Giyani Primary Health Care (PHC) facilities and, secondly, to determine the associations between knowledge, practices and sociodemographic variables.Methods: In this study a quantitative approach and a cross-sectional descriptive design was employed. The convenience sampling method was used to select clinics and consecutive nonprobability sampling was used to select participants. Descriptive statistics such as frequencies, cross-tabulation, and correlation tests were performed to analyse the data. Results were presented in tables and cross-tabulation. Data were tested for normality, and the Chi-square test was performed for correlation. Results: One hundred and seven participants participated in the study. The mean age of the participants was 43.9± 9.387. Most of the participating nurses were female. The majority were professional nurses (57.9%), followed by registered nurses (24.3%) and the least number were staff nurses (17.8%). Most nurses (60.1%) had 7-10 years of work experience, 31.2% had 1-6 years of work experience and 7.5% had more than 10 years of work experience. Most of the nurses (74.7%) received their training on RtHB in the Department of Health workshops, followed by the nursing school (18.7%), the reminder were trained in university while studying (6.5%). The aspects covered during training included a combination of plotting points for growth indicators, interpreting them, procedures for taking anthropometric measurements. The majority of nurses also received training on immunization.Almost 40% of the nurses had a moderate level of knowledge, 35.5% had a low level of knowledge, and only 25.2% of them had a high level of knowledge regarding the use of the nutrition component of RtHB. The results show that the majority of nurses had a good score (77.6%) on practice, followed by a poor score (12.1%) and a best score of 10.3% in the use of the nutritional component of the RtHB. There was no statistically significant association between knowledge and age (p = 0.253) and gender (p = 0.091. There was no statistically significant association between practices and age (p = 0.335), gender (p = 0.308), and category of nursing personnel (p = 0.252). There was a significant association between total knowledge and total nurses’ practices of nurses on the use of the nutrition component of RtHB (p = 0.002). Conclusions: The findings of the current study revealed a moderate level of knowledge and fair practices among participants on the use of the nutritional component of RtHB. However, their ability to accurately use the nutrition component was average. The study also suggests that nurses with a better understanding of the nutritional component were more likely to put their knowledge into practice than those with less knowledge.