World Congress on
Primary Healthcare and Medicare Summit

Biography:

Abstract:

Background of Study:

Mother’s milk is undoubtedly a great and unique blessing of God that has nourished the
entire needs of newborn and is regarded as the healthiest, the safest, the freshest, the
most accessible and ideal nourishment for a child during the first 2 years of his/her life.
There are numerous health benefits of early initiation of breastfeeding and exclusive breastfeeding on survival, physical and mental growth and development of a
child as well as health and well-being of a mother. Thus the present study highlighted the status of breastfeeding practices and determined the associated factors.

Methodology:

 A community based quantitative cross sectional study was conducted in eight wards of Bharatpur Metropolitan, Chitwan Nepal. Systematic random sampling was used to select respondents and sample size for the study was 299. Data were collected through face to face interview using semi-structured questionnaire. The collected data were entered in EPi Data 3.1 and analysis was done in IBM SPSS 20.

Results:

 The study found that out of 297 respondents, 51.8% (CI: 45.2%-57.8%) had done early initiation of breastfeeding (within 1 hour of birth), 40.1% (CI: 34.5%-45.7%) of respondents had done prelacteal feeding, 12.8% (CI: 9.0%-16.6%) had done exclusive breastfeeding. In multivariate analysis factors religion of respondent (AOR=2.549, CI: 1.17-5.57), and respondent knowledge on early initiation of breastfeeding (AOR=3.95, CI: 2.23-7.00), were significantly associated with early initiation of breastfeeding. In regard to prelacteal feeding age of respondents, (AOR=0.42, CI: 0.21-0.84), economic status (AOR= 0.42, CI: 0.18-0.99), and level of knowledge (AOR= 2.66, CI: 1.52-4.67) were significantly associated with prelacteal feeding.  For exclusive breastfeeding respondent knowledge on exclusive breastfeeding (AOR=2.66,
CI:1.52-4.674), sickness of baby up to 0 to 6 months of life (AOR=8.53, CI:2.52-28.84) and mothers participation in household decision making (AOR=6.31, CI:2.184-18.23), were significantly associated with exclusive breastfeeding.

Discussion and Conclusion:

The study revealed that breastfeeding practices were not found good especially prelacteal feeding and exclusive breastfeeding in comparison to early initiation of breastfeeding. The reasons behind the low prevalence were caesarean section, maternal and child health conditions, delay milk secretion, lack of information, baby not able to suck mother's milk and advice of health workers for to fed formula milk mostly in case delivery operating caesarean section.