Abstract:
Introduction: Adequate knowledge of health professionals in helping babies breathe is essential for improving the neonatal outcome. There is a great controversy between studies to show the most frequent barriers to the knowledge of health care providers about helping babies breathe and paucity of information‟s in Ethiopia that show the recent status of knowledge about helping babies breathe despite the improvement in neonatal health care services. Therefore, this study intends to fill those gaps in the study area.
Objective: The aim of this study was to assess knowledge of helping babies breathe and its associated factors among health professionals in hospitals of Gamo, Gofa, Segen Areas People, Konso and South Omo Zone, Southern Ethiopia.
Method and Materials: A facility-based cross-sectional study design was conducted among 445 health professions from March 10-30, 2019. A simple random sampling method was used to select study participants. Pre-tested self-administered questionnaire and observational checklist was used to collect the data. Data were entered in to Epi data version 3.1 and exported to version 22 for analysis. Bivariate and multivariable analysis was done by using binary logistic regression. In this study P-value < 0.05 was considered to declare factors as statistically significant.
Results: A total of 429 health professionals were participated with a response rate of 96.4%. In this study 76.2% (95%CI: 72.2%, 80.3%) of health professionals had adequate knowledge on helping babies breathe. Age group from 25-34 (AOR=3.22; 95%CI: 1.51, 6.87), training (AOR=3.29; 95%CI: 1.87, 5.81), recent involvement in helping babies breathe (AOR=3.71; 95%CI: 1.86, 7.41) and well-equipped facility (AOR=2.36; 95%CI: 1.18, 4.71) were significantly associated with adequate knowledge on helping babies breath.
Conclusions and recommendations: This study indicated that adequate knowledge of health professionals on helping babies breathe was optimum. For better improvement health care providers should be trained and the health facilities should be equipped with adequate materials to provide basic life support for the newborns
