Newborn care practice among Khas, Janajatis and Dalits in Shanishchare Primary Health Care Center (PHC) Area of Jhapa District

Abstract

With the aim of providing insights into the newborn care practice along with to identify the association between social, demographic, economic and modernization variables and newborn care practice in the Shanishchare PHC area, rural community of Jhapa District, a total 252 mothers were interviewed in household survey in companion with three case studies; 18 in-depth interviews with Mother-in-Law, TBA, AHW, ANM and MCHW; and four FGD with mothers having less than twelve month of baby in VDC immunization days. The entered data was exported from the Epidata to SPSS for the analysis. Three types of indexes, i.e. general index, newborn care index and development indexes was prepared for the analysis of newborn care practice. The newborn care index incorporates 25 studied variables. The newborn care practice was divided into three categories such as standard, moderate and poor index based on the achieved index value 0.74+, 0.40 to 0.74 and up to 0.39 respectively. Four types of development indexes such as demographic development index, social development index, economic development index and modernization development index was developed to test the hypothesis and for the cross tabulation with newborn care index. The score one to six was provided based on the cross table analysis and correlation coefficient between independent variables relating to economic, social, demographic and modernization variables and newborn care practice for making development indexes. The moderate newborn care practice was more common followed by standard and poor respectively. The newborn care practice was also studied in accordance with ethnicity i.e. Khas, Dalit and Indigenous nationalities (Janajati). Khas mothers were found better newborn care practice while Dalit in middle position and Janajati in least position. On the basis of the correlation coefficient between the development indexes and newborn care index, the study concluded that having higher social and demographic status of mothers have better newborn care practice in rural community. Likewise, better economic and modernization variables also contribute positively to enhance the newborn care practice.