Abstract:
Nutrition literacy is the degree to which individuals have the capacity to get,
process, and understand nutrition information and skills needed to make right nutrition
decisions. It is the capacity to get, process, and understand basic nutrition information and
nutrition services needed to make right health decisions. There is distinct paucity of literature
and no study has been done in Ethiopia to determine the level of nutritional literacy among
health professionals.
Objective: To assess nutritional literacy status of health professionals in Government
Hospitals of Bale Zone; South Eastern Ethiopia, from December 6-31, 2021.
Methods: An institution based cross-sectional study was employed. From the five Hospitals in
Bale Zone, 316 health professionals were selected by systematic random sampling and all
Hospitals Food and Nutritional Service coordinators were included for interview. Nutritional
literacy instrument and other self-administered questionnaires were used to assess nutritional
literacy, nutritional status, quality of nutritional care and other related variables. Data were
entered into Epi data version 3.1 and exported to Statistical Package for Social Science version
21 for analysis. Descriptive analysis was displayed and the results were presented by tables
and graphs. Binary logistic regression was used to identify factors associated with nutritional
literacy status among health professionals. Accordingly, AOR with 95% confidence interval
was computed and p value <0.05 was used to declare statistical significance.
Result: The overall magnitude of adequate nutritional literacy was 34.5% (95% CI (29.7-
40.2). The magnitude of nutritional literacy of the five domains, nutrition and health,
micronutrient, household food measurement, food label and numeracy, and food group were
68.4%, 56.4%, 8.5, 38.3% and 44.6%, respectively. All the hospitals were on substantial food
and nutritional care quality. Being females [(AOR=0.47; 95% CI: (0.25, 0.86)], working in
General hospital [(AOR=2.2; 95% CI: (1.20, 4.28)], and being Doctor [(AOR=3.3; 95% CI:
(1.34, 8.14)] were significantly associated with nutritional literacy.
Conclusion: The magnitude of adequate nutritional literacy was poor in relative to similar
studies. Since most subjects had non nutrition academic degrees, so they had a bit nutrition
course which can justify their poor nutritional literacy level. Factors including gender, type of
hospital and study field were positively associated with nutritional literacy.
