WORLD JOURNAL OF ADVANCE
HEALTHCARE RESEARCH

Pooja Joshi*, Dr. Hardeep Kaur and Dr. Priyanka Devgun

ABSTRACT

Background: Every day, millions of parents seek health care for their sick children, taking them to hospitals, health centres, traditional healers etc, surveys revealed lack of proper assessment and treatment by these health workers. The reduction in Neonatal and infant mortality rates over the past years has been slow. It envisaged training of primary care workers and medical officers in identification, management and referral of neonatal and childhood illness. Materials and Methods: The pilot study aimed to assess the Knowledge of health workers regarding Integrated management of Neonatal and Childhood Illness at selected health centers of Amritsar, Punjab. Health workers who were fulfilling the inclusion criteria were recruited using a convenient sampling technique and quantitaive research approach. Data was collected from total 40 health workers including Medical officers, ANMs, ASHA workers and Community health officers. The self structured knowledge questionnaire consist of 30 items which was developed by the researcher to assess the knowledge of health workers regarding individual items of IMNCI. Results: The reliability of the self structured questionnaire was found to be. 815 which was calculated by Cronbach's Alpha. The pilot study was found to be feasible in terms of availability of subjects. The time required to collect the data was approximately 20-30 minutes. It also showed that 40% health workers were having average knowledge and 13(33%) having good knowledge, 8(20%) were having poor knowledge and only 3(8%) were having excellent knowledge. Conclusion: This depicted that the overall knowledge of the health workers as lessened which is needed to be addressed and retraining of health workers should be conducted after a stipulated time period.