Knowledge of mothers about factors contributing to undernutrition among 0-5 years children attending children specialist hospital, centre Igboro, Ilorin, Kwara state

Description

Abstract

Knowledge of mothers about factors contributing to undernutrition among 0-5 years children attending children specialist hospital, centre Igboro, Ilorin, Kwara state.

This project work examined the knowledge of mothers about factors contributing to undernutrition among 0-5 years children attending children’s Specialist Hospital, Centre Igboro, Ilorin, Kwara State. It also informed the health officers on the knowledge of mothers about factors contributing to undernutrition in the hospital. Among the objectives is to assess knowledge of mothers about undernutrition among 0-5 years children, to identify factors contributing to undernutrition among 0-5 years children, to identify the measures to combat undernutrition among 0-5 years children, to ascertain the relationship between socio-economic status of mothers with their knowledge about factors contributing to undernutrition among 0-5 years children, to explore the relationship between religion and cultural belief of mothers with their knowledge about factors contributing to undernutrition among 0-5 years children among others. Many medical and allied literatures were reviewed to develop more facts for the project work. This research use descriptive survey to sample the patients attending Specialist Hospital Igboro, Kwara State. Questionnaire is the instrument used to gather and analyze the data, 50 questionnaires were distributed out of which 50 were retrieved. In conclusion, recommendations were made that awareness campaigns on the practices of exclusive breastfeeding, proper weaning diet and good nutrition should be intensified to prevent undernutrition in the first one year of life, Nurses should be encouraged to carry out the cooking demonstration and ask mothers to do return demonstration, Traditional beliefs and taboos that are detrimental to health should be discouraged. It was also recommended that there should be calls for consented efforts by all stakeholders to come up with strategies to prevent undernutrition because the fight against undernutrition is one of the biggest challenges of public health today. Keywords Undernutrition, health, knowledge, factors, and mothers