Study on knowledge attitudes and practices of principle caregivers on selected factors in the revised child health development record in the district of Monaragala

Abstract

A descriptive cross sectional study was designed to assess the knowledge, attitudes and practices of caregivers regarding the revised CHDR and to identify associations between knowledge, attitudes and practices and selected family characteristics. 427 interviews were conducted by PH11 with caregivers having children who had completed nine months and had come to the Child Welfare Clinics to get the secondary data was gathered from the CHDR by the SPHMM. Regarding the birth weight, 83.4 percentage of caregivers knew it accurately while 77.4 percent knew that birth weight should be recorded by the hospital staff where the child was born, The caregivers' knowledge on the accurate birth weight correlated significantly with the birth weight recorded in the : CHDR (p=0.01). The utilization of thev CHDR as a source of information was 792 percent for birth weight, 59.9 percent for correct frequency of weighing and 59.3 percent for correct age of child for next immunization . The ability to interpret growth charts was good with 88 percent able to interpret a normal growth chart while 77.3 percent and 80.1 percent able to interpret growth charts with growth faltering and acute under weight respectively . Althrough the knowledge ( 99.3 percent for vision and 99.1 percent for hearing) and attitudes ( 979 percent for vision and 95.6 percent for hearing) of caregivers on the importance of screening for vision and hearing at home was quite high only 63 percent and 59.7 percent had screened and recorded the vision and hearing in the CHDR respectively.