What’s known
- Every parents working hard to keep their children’s healthy at all
stages of child, and parent’s knowledge and attitudes about health is
very important
- Diarrhea is a common illness that is considered a major threat to
children, and it may lead to death in developing countries
particularly amongst children aged up to 5 years
- Enhancing mothers’ proper knowledge and demonstrating appropriate
practice is a key to prevent or halt the progression of diarrhea.
However, mothers’ harmful practices such as nourishment limitation,
breast feeding avoidance, and utilization of inappropriate
conventional therapy or wrong prescription have been reported.
What’s new
In most cases, diarrhea can be treated at home by oral rehydration
therapy (ORT) that has significantly decreased the mortality related
to diarrhea disease.13 Although this method of treatment is cheap,
adequate, reasonable, and safe, few mothers listed that the aim of
using (ORS) during diarrhea is to treat dehydration of diarrhea.
In order to demonstrate the best home care of children with diarrhea
in our community(Saudi) by investigating certain knowledge
deficiencies, specific inappropriate attitude, and particular improper
practice toward children diarrhea and its management
INTRODUCTION
Diarrhea is a common illness that is considered a major threat to
children, and it may lead to death in developing countries particularly
amongst children aged up to 5 years 1-3 Twelve million
children are estimated to die in developing countries before the age of
five years. Around 70% of those children die because of five medical
issues; one of them is diarrhea. 1,4 Despite of that
age, climate changes, and the use of rotavirus vaccine can contribute to
variations in pathogen-causative diarrhea, rotavirus was the most common
causative pathogen especially in unvaccinated children against
rotavirus.5 In Saudi Arabia, rotavirus was noticed in
41.3% to 65.5 % of cases causing children
diarrhea.6,7 In addition to microbial-induced
diarrhea, Diarrhea can result from intolerance of certain kinds of food
particularly lactose containing milk.8
Regardless of diarrhea-induced causes, dirty weaning food, improper
nourishing practice, absence of clean water, poor hand washing,
constrained sterile transfer of waste, poor lodging conditions, and
absence of access to satisfactory and moderate social insurance are
aggravating factors of diarrhea in children under 5 years
old.9 A study in Saudi Arabia reported that
environmental risk factors associated children diarrhea included sewage
leakage near the home, eating out after school hours and utilizing
reusable cloths or sponges to dry dishes.10
Enhancing mothers’ proper knowledge and demonstrating appropriate
practice is a key to prevent or halt the progression of diarrhea.
However, mothers’ harmful practices such as nourishment limitation,
breast feeding avoidance, and utilization of inappropriate conventional
therapy or wrong prescription have been reported.11 In
addition, the knowledge of mothers toward the signs of dehydration
secondary to diarrhea is poor.2,12 In most cases,
diarrhea can be treated at home by oral rehydration therapy (ORT) that
has significantly decreased the mortality related to diarrhea
disease.13 Although this method of treatment is cheap,
adequate, reasonable, and safe, few mothers listed that the aim of using
(ORS) during diarrhea is to treat dehydration of
diarrhea.2,13 In order to demonstrate the best home
care of children with diarrhea in our community by investigating certain
knowledge deficiencies, specific inappropriate attitude, and particular
improper practice toward children diarrhea and its management, the aim
of this study is to evaluate knowledge, attitude and practice of mothers
towards diarrhea in children and its management at home.
METHODS AND MATERIALS
Online cross-sectional survey based study targeting mothers who are
living in Saudi Arabia were carried out to measure knowledge, attitude
and practice of mothers towards diarrhea and its management in their
children at home. The data collection was carried out from the beginning
of March to the end of April 2019. The questionnaires for this study was
prepared after an extensive literature review from similar studies
published in this regard 2,13. The questionnaires for
this study grouped in four parts. The first part was to collect
demographic data (such as age of mother, mother’s education level,
mother’s job, child’s age, etc.). The second part is the knowledge
domain questions with the multiple-choice options discussing subjects
like signs and symptoms of diarrhea, diarrhea causes, preventive
measures and critical signs of diarrhea as well as critical signs of
dehydration. The third part focused on manner of management practice of
diarrhea at home. The fourth part was the attitude domain questions that
were composed of 11 questions assessed by 5 point Likert Scale (strongly
agree, agree, neutral, disagree, and strongly disagree). A panel of 3
members (two professors and a researcher) from college of pharmacy, king
Saud university who were experts in preparing the study tool were
reviewed the questionnaire. The survey was translated into Arabic
language by an independent translator, and reviewed again for the
appropriateness of language before testing its validity. The
questionnaire was then validated through randomly selected 10
respondents in a pilot study carried out at college of pharmacy king
Saud university. The respondents recruited in the pilot study were
mothers and did not include in the final results or had no contact with
the subjects of the study. Reliability test was determined using
Cronbach’s alpha of the questionnaire and it was found 0.73.
The sample size for this study was calculated using an online sample
size calculator (http://www.raosoft.com/samplesize.html) by
assuming a larger population size with a margin of error ± 5% and a
confidence level of 95%, which resulted in a sample of 384 individuals.14 Statistical Package for Social Sciences version 25
(SPSS) software was applied to analyze the data. Descriptive statistics
and Chi-squared test were also used.
RESULTS
A total of 1140 respondents filled the questionnaire. About 24% of
respondents were aged from 36 to 40 years, and only 5.4 % of
respondents received no formal education. More than half of mothers were
housewife (52.1%). Slight more than one third of children were aged
above 2 years. The demographic of mothers and their children are
summarized in Table 1. Table 1. Demographic data of mothers and their
children