6^th World Nursing and Healthcare Conference

Biography

Biography: Pushpamala Ramaiah

Abstract

Introduction: Kangaroo mother care has often been used as a treatment for premature or preterm babies. As the 21st century is in the threshold of challenging preventive healthy interventions, the evidence based practice of newborn care must be efficiently adopted for applying in the operational milieu of rural care facilities and the awareness on KMC should be taught , among the expected mothers in all country wide, perinatal-neonatal care units. Aim: To determine the level of knowledge and practices regarding KMC among the mothers with preterm babies. To find out the association between the knowledge and practices regarding KMC among the mothers with preterm babies. To determine the association between the knowledge and practices regarding KMC among the mothers with preterm babies with their selected demographic variables. To develop a self-instructional module for rural health Centers for the selected rural maternity health centers. Materials and Methods: The conceptual framework of this study was based on Pendersons Health Promotion Model. Descriptive survey approach was adopted, where the structured interview schedule was conducted to collect the data to assess their knowledge and their practices on KMC. Sampling Technique: Purposive sampling Technique was used for this study where 60 postnatal mothers with pre-term babies were included in the research. Findings: Majority of the mothers had inadequate knowledge (65%), none of them had adequate knowledge. The mothers who belonged to moderate practices of KMC were 76.66%, in comparison with 23.33% of mothers with adequate practices. In association of knowledge with practices, it was revealed that, the mean knowledge scores of subjects were found to be 39.48% only, with the SD of 3.1, which fall in the category of average knowledge, further to this, it was found that the mean practice scores of subjects were 66.12, with a SD value of 1.54, which concluded that the respondents had higher level of practices as compared to the level of knowledge on KMC. There was a positive correlation between knowledge and practices of postnatal mothers regarding KMC. There was a positive association found between level of knowledge and practices with demographic variables such as age, education and parity. Conclusion: It was concluded that there is a need to improve the knowledge and the practices with regard to KMC, hence the self- instructional module was developed for the maternity centre’s to promote the wellbeing of neonatal care of preterm babies.