Nutrition knowledge, attitude and practice of professional health workers in Morogoro urban district

Nutritional knowledge plays an important role in public health. However, there has been general concern about the state of nutritional knowledge of nurses and clinicians in many parts of the world. The aim of this study was to examine the nutrition knowledge, attitude and practice of professional health workers at Morogoro Urban district. This was a descriptive cross sectional study whereby one hundred and fifty five health workers (100 nurses and 55 clinicians) completed a self administered questionnaire. The response rate was 58%. In addition, 40 health workers were interviewed and focus group discussion was done to a group of nurses and a group of clinicians separately. The overall performance of the respondents on the nutrition knowledge, attitude and practice was poor. Overall nutrition knowledge scores were graded as poor. Clinician’s had a mean score of 42% and nurses a mean score of 42%. Clinicians had higher scores (22%) with good and very good nutrition scores than nurses (5%). The nutrition knowledge of most clinicians recruited for this study was poor (53%) and mediocre in 38% of them, however, nutrition knowledge of most nurses was mediocre (56%) and poor (40%). Respondents had concern on the adequacy of their nutrition information as most of them rated their knowledge as moderate. Furthermore respondents had a negative impression over the extent of over nutrition in Tanzania. Although health workers regarded nutritional care as an important component of their health delivery responsibility in nutrition counselling, only 17% always provided nutrition counselling to patients. Barriers to nutrition counselling included lack of time, equipment and human resources. This study indicates that there are gaps in the nutrition knowledge of the nurses and clinicians and most of them may not have the expertise to properly advise their patients or clients on the important aspects of nutrition.

Belgian Technical Cooperation (BTC)