Impact of personal child care hygiene counselling on mothers' Knowledge, Attitude, & Practices (KAP) toward preschool children

Personal hygiene aids in disease prevention and health promotion. It is vital in every phase of life, but good hygiene starts in childhood. Children under the age of five generally spend most of their time with parents and guardians, especially mothers, even when they attend pre-schools or nurseries. Mothers are the primary role model for them, and their health beliefs and attitude towards health care, act as a significant predictor of children's personal hygiene care. Hence knowledge of mothers has an important role in the maintenance of personal hygiene of the children. This study was conducted with an objective to evaluate the impact of personal child care hygiene counselling intervention on knowledge, attitude and practices of the mothers towards preschool children. A total of 300 mothers were selected as participants for the counselling intervention programme. Out of these 300 mothers, 153 mothers were treated as the experimental group for intervention and the other 147 mothers as the control group. The experimental group received personal child care hygiene education through counseling provided by the researcher, while the control group did not. KAP method was used to measure the impact of counselling. Based on the results, it was concluded that knowledge, attitude and practice score level of the mothers in the experimental group improved appreciably and was statistically significant at 5% level (p-value < 0.05).