Knowledge on Pneumonia and its Prevention among Mothers of under Five Children

A study to assess theKnowledge on pneumonia and its prevention among mothers of under five children with the objectives to assess the knowledge regarding pneumonia and its prevention among mothers of under five children and to find out the association of knowledge with demographic variables. A descriptive cross sectional research design with convenience sampling technique was used for this study. The target population of the study was the mothers of under five children attending pediatric OPD and wards, of a tertiary hospital, Puducherry. All the available under five mothers who attended the OPD and wards during data collection period were the study population. 138 under five mothers who fulfilled the inclusion criteria were participated in this study. Purpose of the study was explained to each mother and a written consent was obtained in Tamil. A structured questionnaire was used to collect the data from the mothers after establishing validity from experts of specific subjects. Data was collected using structured questionnaire for assessing knowledge on pneumonia and its prevention by interviewing the mothers of under five children for about 15 minutes. Descriptive statistics (frequencies, percentages, mean and standard deviation) and inferential statistics (chi square test) were used to summarize the data and to test the hypothesis. The study result showed that Majority of the mothers age were between 20 - 30 years, most of the mothers belongs to upper middle class in Kuppusamy scale, almost 83.4% of mothers belongs to Hindu religion, 55.1% of mothers belongs to joint family, high proportion of mothers i.e., 76.1% were residing in rural areas, 57.2% of mothers under five children?s were male, 46.3% of mothers children?s were in the birth order of 2. The present study also showed that 91.4% of mothers had poor knowledge, 8.6% of mothers had moderate knowledge and no mothers had high level of knowledge regarding the pneumonia and its prevention and There was no significant association between knowledge and selected demographic variables of mothers of under five children.