Abstract:
Background: Essential new born care is a care given after birth for neonate like safe cord care,
skin to skin contact, early initiation of breast feeding and delay bathing. As studies indicated
especially in sub Saharan Africa countries including Ethiopia the main factors contributed to
poor newborn survival were home deliveries without skilled birth attendants (SBAs), delay in
seeking care during illness, lack of birth preparedness of the family, low socio-economic issues,
illiteracy, lack of basic prenatal, delivery, and postnatal services. In Afar region, neonatal
mortality remains high and accounts for about half of the under-five mortality. However, there is
limited data on practice of mothers about newborn care at the community level.
Objective: The Purpose of this study is to assess the magnitude of essential newborn care
practice and associated factors among mothers who gave birth at home in the past 12 months in
Gelealu District, Afar Region, Ethiopia, from March 14 to March 24, 2019.
Methods: A community-based cross sectional study design was conducted from March 14 to
march 24, 2019. Data were collected from 462 randomly selected mothers making response rate
of 98.3%. The data were entered using Epi-Data version 3.02 and analyzed using SPSS version
20 for further statistical analysis. Multivariate analysis was used to identify associated factors &
the strength of association was measured by odd ratios with 95% CI at p-value of < 0.05.
Results: In this study majority of the respondents 81.8%, 72.5%, 53.5% had good breastfeeding,
thermal care, and cord care practices respectively. The overall good practice of essential
newborn care was 60.8%, which is a low practice from the standard. Number of ANC visit
[(AOR=4.27; 95% CI (2.47, 7.40)], good knowledge of mother’s about ENBC practice
[(AOR=4.20; 95% CI (2.28, 7.75)], being pastoralist [(AOR=0.36; 95% CI (0.16, 0.83)] and
primarily level mothers [(AOR=0.43; 95% CI (0.25, 0.76)] were the independent predictor
factors for practice of good essential newborn care.
Conclusion and recommendation: This study showed that the level of newborn care practices
of more than half of mothers was good. The independent and significant predictors of ENBC
practices were number of ANC visit, knowledge of mother’s about ENBC, mother’s occupation
and educational levels of mothers. Promotion of essential newborn care to community through
provision of training to HEW and WDA by zonal and district health office was recommended.
