Essential Newborn Care Practice Among Primary Healthcare Workers at Public Health Facilities of Ethiopia

Essential Newborn Care Practice Among Primary Healthcare Workers

Abstract

Background: Worldwide neonatal mortality remains unacceptably high and is disproportionately concentrated in Sub-Saharan African countries, including Ethiopia. The care given immediately after birth is crucial for survival and a decrease in the mortality rate. Healthcare workers need to have skills in preventive and curative care for newborns. This study aimed to assess Essential newborn care practices among primary healthcare workers. Objective: To assess Essential newborn care practices among primary health workers. Methods: An institution-based cross-sectional study was conducted in southern  Ethiopia from July to August 2021. Data were collected from 407 randomly selected healthcare workers through a face-to-face interview. The data were cleaned, entered into Epi-Data  4.02, and then exported to SPSS  21.0 for analysis. Binary logistic regression with p-values less than 0.25 was entered into a multivariable logistic regression for analysis. Finally, adjusted odds ratios (AOR) with 95% confidence intervals at a p-value of <0.05 were considered as a statistically significant association with the outcome variable. Results: A total of 407 health workers participated in the study, with a response rate of 97.83 percent. This study revealed that 57.7% (95% CI: 52.7–62.7) of health workers practiced essential newborn care properly. The factors significantly associated were profession (AOR = 0.032, CI: 0.010, 0.101), getting in-service training (AOR =2.21, 95% CI: 1.214, 12.199), presence of guidelines (AOR = 3.621, 95% CI: 1.667, 7.867), Education qualification (AOR = 3.091, 95% CI: 1.130, 8.455), and workload (AOR = 0.108, 95% CI: 0.210, 0.545), which were factors significantly associated with proper practice of essential newborn care. Conclusion: The practice of essential newborn care was generally low. Therefore, improvement in essential newborn care practices might be attained through modifiable, proven interventions like the provision of in-service training, the use of guidelines, and the hiring of sufficient healthcare workers for essential newborn care.