Tropical Journal of Pharmaceutical Research

Original Research Article | OPEN ACCESS

Mothers' Knowledge, Attitude and Practice Regarding Diarrhea and its Management in Morang Nepal: An Interventional Study

Mukhtar Ansari¹ , Mohamed Izham Mohamed Ibrahim², Ravi P Shankar³

¹Discipline of Social & Administrative Pharmacy, School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang, Malaysia; ²Clinical Pharmacy & Practice, College of Pharmacy, Qatar University, Doha, Qatar; ³Department of Pharmacology, KIST Medical College, Lalitpur, Nepal.

For correspondence:- Mukhtar Ansari Email: mukhtar1998@yahoo.com

Received: 31 January 2012 Accepted: 21 July 2012 Published: 18 October 2012

Citation: Ansari M, Mohamed Ibrahim MI, Shankar RP. Mothers' Knowledge, Attitude and Practice Regarding Diarrhea and its Management in Morang Nepal: An Interventional Study. Trop J Pharm Res 2012; 11(5):847-854 doi: 10.4314/tjpr.v11i5.19

© 2012 The authors.
This is an Open Access article that uses a funding model which does not charge readers or their institutions for access and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0) and the Budapest Open Access Initiative (http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org/read), which permit unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited..

Abstract

Purpose: To assess diarrhea-related knowledge, attitude and practice through successive educational interventions.

Methods: This was an interventional study conducted at nine different locations of Morang district, Nepal from March 2010 to January 2011. Multistage random sampling approach was adopted to sample 630 subjects and they were randomly assigned to test and control groups. The subjects in the test group were provided an educational intervention designed on the basis of World Health Organization guidelines. Data collection followed by intervention was conducted at baseline, 1 month and 3 months; at 6 months, only data were taken without intervention.

Results: About 90 % of the mothers were from the age group 16-30 years and most (93 %) of them were agricultural laborers. A majority (> 62%) of the mothers were not educated. Educational interventions brought about significant improvement in knowledge, attitude and practice at 1st, 2nd and 3rd follow-up. The median scores of knowledge, attitude and practice increased from 14, 7, 6 to 26, 9, 13, respectively, due to repeated interventions. Furthermore, interventions strengthened the correlation between knowledge, attitude and practice.

Conclusion: Intervention was beneficial in improving mothers’ knowledge, attitude and practice regarding diarrhea and its management.

Keywords: Attitude, Diarrhea, Intervention, Knowledge, Mothers, Practice