Quality of care practices provided to children under five years of age in Temeke municipal, Dar es salaam

Abstract

This study was carried out to assess quality of care practices provided to children of below five years of age in Temeke Municipality Dar es Salaam. The study consisted of two phases, the first phase was development of a care assessment tool (Care Score Index) and the second phase was assessing the quality of care practices in the study area using the developed tool. The tool comprised of four parameters of child care practices which are maternal health seeking practices and child immunization, child feeding practices, psychosocial care practices and hygiene practices. A total of 198 mothers with their children were randomly selected to participate in a cross-section study in four wards of Temeke Municipal. Data were analysed using IBM SPSS version 20 and WHO Anthro software version 3.2.2. The development of Care Score Index has been taken as a first step in formulating a more universal tool to be used for assessing child care practices within households in different societies in Tanzania. Respondents were found to have good care practices with high proportion of scores in category one which represented higher scores, except for maternal health seeking practices whereby greater proportion were in category two (lower scores). Maternal factors such as education, marital status, occupation and number of children were found to have no significant association with quality of care practices. The overall care score was significantly associated with underweight (p=0.003) while child feeding practices score was significantly associated with underweight (p=0.009) and wasting (p=0.017). The study concluded that composite of index for dimension of quality of child care practices has potential in assessing health and nutrition outcome. Therefore, it is recommended that coverage of more varied type of stakeholders should continue in developing and validating simple tools to measure care practices that can be used in different societies in Tanzania.