ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Public Health
Sec. Children and Health
Volume 13 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpubh.2025.1569970
This article is part of the Research TopicMaternal Health Services Utilization in Sub-Saharan AfricaView all 17 articles
Health Post Readiness and its Influence on Mothers' Care-seeking Practice for Their Sick Children in Ethiopia
Provisionally accepted
- 1Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
- 2JSI Research and Training Institute, Ethiopia, Addis Ababa, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
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Infection accounts for about half of all neonatal deaths and it contributes to 37% of neonatal deaths in Sub-Saharan Africa where there is low health facility readiness and the quality of service given at health facilities is low. In this study, we assessed the influence of health posts' readiness on the care-seeking behavior of mothers of sick young children.This study analyzed data from a community-based implementation survey conducted by JSI in the two districts of Ethiopia from April 2021 to July 2022. In this study, we enrolled 4,262 and 4,081 mothers with children < 15 months at the baseline and end-line surveys respectively of which 508 and 359 infants were diagnosed for illness at 66 and 64 health posts at the baseline and end-line surveys. We used the Service Availability and Readiness Assessment tool to compute the facility readiness score. We used independent sample t-test and logistic regression to see the contributions of facility readiness for care-seeking practices of mothers.AOR at 95% CI and p-value < 0.05 is used to declare a statistically significant association between variables and to control the confounding.In the end-line survey about 359 sick young infants were identified. And in the baseline survey, 508 young infants were ill. Most of 88.0% sick young infants sought care in the end line compared to 57.3% at the baseline (P<0.001). The overall summated mean facility readiness score was 69.6%, equivalent to 49.0 % of the standardized mean score.This study also highlights rich households (AOR=2.02; 95% CI: 1.1-3.9), reaching out to health posts (HPs) equipped with materials and supplies (AOR= 1.52; 95% CI: 1.2-1.9), and ANC use (AOR=2.35; 95%CI: 1.2-4.7) were positively associated with care seeking practice compared to their counterparts.The study reveals a moderate level of health post-readiness that needs improvement. Health posts readiness, ANC use, parity, and wealth status influenced the careseeking behavior of mothers for their sick children.
Keywords: Health post readiness, Sick young infants, Community level, iCCM implementation, Care seeking
Received: 02 Feb 2025; Accepted: 27 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Mekonnen, Tiruneh, Birhane and Mekonnen. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Wassie Negash Mekonnen, Addis Ababa University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia
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