Abstract:
Background: For centuries, sunlight has been used for therapeutic purposes. However; sunlight exposure of skin is the vital part for the production of vitamin D in human being. Vitamin D deficiency is reported even in country with abundant sunshine through the year and this problem is worsening on infants. Cultural and unhealthy child care practice such as inadequate infants sunlight exposure contributes to the occurrences of the problem.
Objectives: To assess knowledge, practice and associated factors of adequate sunlight exposure of infants among mothers attending Dano district health centers, oromia region, Ethiopia, 2021
Methods A cross sectional institution based study design was conducted among mothers attending under five and immunization clinics of all Dano district health center from August 1/2021- September 25/ 2021. A systematic random sampling method was used among 332 mothers. Data was collected with face to face interview using pretested, structured questionnaire and entered to Epi-Data version 3.1software and exported to SPSS statistical software version 20 for analysis. Descriptive statistics like frequency distribution, proportions, percentages, and measures of central tendency was used to summarize data.
Bivariate and lastly multivariate binary logistic regressions analysis was used to control confounders. p value <0.05 was used to declare statistical significance.
Results: Total of 332 mothers participated in the study with 99.7 %response rate.
From the total respondents 68.2% of mothers had poor knowledge and 59.6% had poor practice of adequate sunlight exposure of infants. In multivariate analysis occupation [(AOR=3.456, 95%CI (1.60, 7.45)] showed significant association with knowledge whereas family size [(AOR=2.59, 95%CI (1.26, 5.304)] and occupation [(AOR=2.19, 95%CI (1.09, 4.41)] were found significant association with practice of infant sunlight exposure.
Conclusion: The finding of this study showed that mothers in the study institution had poor knowledge and poor practice about adequate sunlight exposure of their infants.
Recommendations: mothers need to be educated about importance of adequate infants sunlight exposure according to WHO guideline especially updated IMNCI
