Publication:

Effectiveness of structured teaching program on knowledge regarding impact of bottle feeding among mothers of 6 months to 2 years children at Vivekananda polyclinic and institute of medical sciences, Lucknow

Background Breastfeeding is the key to a child’s survival, health, growth and development. WHO has stipulated that the feeding bottle with a nipple should not be used at any age, in order to achieve optimal growth, development and health of infants. Despite this, bottle feeding to infants is still practiced across our country due to various socio-cultural reasons. And it was seen that in bottle-fed children, the frequency of diarrhoea was 26.08%

Methods Quasi-experimental one group pre-test post-test research design was adopted and 60 mothers of children (between 6 months to 2 years of age) whose children were admitted in paediatric ward were selected as samples of the study. Self-structured questionnaire was used to assess the pretest and post-test knowledge.

Results In Pre-test, 93.3% of the samples had average knowledge and 6.7% of the samples had good knowledge, while in the post-test 16.7% had average knowledge and 83.3% of the samples had good knowledge. The t-statistic for this test was 12.061, with 59 degrees of freedom. Therefore, the results are statistically significant, demonstrating that the educational intervention had a significant positive impact on the mothers of 6 months to 2 years’ children' knowledge of the Impact of bottle feeding.

Conclusions It was concluded that structured teaching program was highly effective in improving the knowledge level of the mothers regarding bottle feeding and it should be regularly put into practice in health care settings.