NUTRITIONAL LITERACY AMONG HEALTH PROFESSIONALS WORKING IN PUBLIC HOSPITALS OF BALE ZONE, SOUTH EASTERN ETHIOPIA

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.