Study area and period
The study was conducted in Assosa Zone governmental health facilities from April to august 2021 in western Ethiopia. Assosa zone is bordered, by Begi town Oromia region in the south, in the west by Sudan. Based on the 2007 Census conducted by the Central Statistical Agency of Ethiopia (CSA), this Zone has a total population of 310,822, of whom 158,932 are men and 151,890 were women. 39,957 or 12.86% of population are urban inhabitants. In this Zone there are two Hospitals and 16 Health centers. A total of 72,879 households were counted in this Zone, which results in an average of 4.27 persons to a household, and 69,378 housing units.
Study design
Facility based cross-sectional study design was conducted in selected governmental health facilities of Assosa Zonea. Western Ethiopia.
Population
Source Population: The source population is all nurses and midwives who were working in governmental Health facilities of Assosa ZoneWestern Ethiopia.
Study population
The study population was those Nurses and Midwifes who were engaged in Essential newborn care service provision in Assosa Zone selected governmental health facilities during the data collection period.
Inclusion and Exclusion criteria
Inclusion Criteria
Nurses and midwives fulfilling the following criteria were included in the study:
- All midwives and nurses who were working in delivery room, neonatal intensive care unit and immediate post natal care of selected health facilities.
Exclusion criteria
- Some nurses and midwives were excluded from the study because of the following:
- Health care providers who didn’t provide immediate newborn care for more than three months were excluded from the study.
- Those who were on annual leave.
Sample Size Determination
Since all nurses and midwives working in Assosa town governmental health facility were taken as sampling size, the sample size was all the number of study population which was 272. All 272 nurses and Midwives health care providers were enrolled in the study to increase representativeness of the sample.
Sampling procedures
The maximum effort was done to ensure that all the nurses and midwives involved in Essential newborn care provision during the study period to be interviewed. The data collection was conducted during working hours also data collectors tried to reach to health facilities as early as possible to make possible arrangements for par timer workers.
Procedure
Data was collected by interviewer administered structured and pretested questionnaires. The questionnaires had four parts: part one socio-demographic characteristics, part two: personal and institutional factors, part three was knowledge of essential newborn car and part four was practice of essential new born care. The questionnaires had close ended questions and participants were given explanation to complete the necessary information by themselves. Four Bsc holders nurse and midwife were recruited for data collection. Overall, the data collection procedure was coordinated and supervised by the principal investigator.
Study Variables
Dependant Variables
Knowledge of Essential new born care
Practice of Essential new born care.
Independent variables
Socio-demographic and personal institutional factors and individual related factors
Operational definition
Good knowledge: those health care providers who correctly answer at least half of the knowledge questions are categorized as having satisfactory knowledge[18].
Poor knowledge
If the health care provider answers the knowledge questions below mean score of knowledge questions[19].
Good practice
Is when the health care providers perform more than or equal to 70% the practice procedures[20].
Poor practice If the health care providers perform less than 70% of the practice techniques[19].
Data quality control
Data collectors have been trained on the study objective and the methods of data collection. The English version of the questionnaire was created and translated into the Tigrigna version (local language). The tool was pre-tested on five percent of the sample size at Assosa Hospital Assosa town. The supervisor and principal investigator performed continuous follow-up and monitoring to ensure the completeness and consistency of the data.
Data processing and analysis
The Epi Data Manager was used to clean and enter data and then exported to SPSS version 26.0 for analysis. The knowledge questions were calculated and rated with 1 and 0 and dichotomized into good and bad knowledge. The practice of essential new born care answers on a 13-point scale: 0 = never,1 = some new born care was taken into account by assigning values to Likert scale and dichotomized into 1 and 0 based on the summed value of 70% score as the cut-off point. A binary logistic regression model was used to test the statistical relationship between the outcome variable with p-value 0.2 were entered into binary logistic regressive and independent variables. The goodness of fit of the model was checked by the Hosmerlemshow test. Finally, the statistical significance was declared with a p-value <0.05.
Research dissemination and presentation
The research finding was presented to Assosa university department of public health. The hard copy was given to Assosa University College of health sciences, department of public health officer.