Abstract:
Background: Nutritional knowledge and practices regarding management of chronic diseases like tuberculosis are essential parts in in the health facilities and plays a key role in improvement, prevention and control of under-nutrition. Studies indicate that HCPs don’t have sufficient nutritional knowledge & skills which cannot play an effective role in patient’s management leads to incorrect advice being given to patients.
Objective: The study was carried out to assess the level of Knowledge, practices and associated factors towards nutritional care and support for patients with TB among HCPs in health facilities of Bahir Dar town.
Methods: Facility based cross sectional study was conducted from March 01 - May, 30/2017. A total of 441 HCPs were included in the study. A pre-tested self-administered questionnaire was used. Multivariate logistic regression was used to identify factors associated with HCPs knowledge and practices.
Results: Response rate of the study was 95.2%. About 73% of the respondents were knowledgeable and 49% were good practices. Physicians had good knowledge & practice than nurses (AOR 5.5, CI 2.10, 13.72), masters and above had good knowledge & practice than others (AOR 5.00, CI 1.05, 23.86), working in public had good knowledge & practice than work in private (AOR 3.09, CI 1.80, 5.33), attended on TB training had good knowledge & practice than others (AOR 4.24, CI 2.16, 8.33) and HCPs with TB related work experience had good knowledge & practice than others (AOR 7.21, CI 3.18, 16.37) resulted to have good knowledge.
Conclusion: The overall nutritional care and support for patients with TB by HCPs in the HFs of Bahir Dar town were not satisfactory. A great emphasis on training & continuing education for nurses and physicians has to be addressed, work in collaboration with the health facilities to improve the low level of nutritional care and support practice and further study needs to be conducted to explore factors associated with knowledge and practice.