Mother's practice about applying A+D supplement for infants and some related social factors

Micronutrients deficiency including vitamins deficiency in children is one of the prevalent nutritional problems all over the world. There are different strategies to control this malnutrition. Supplementation with A or multivitamins is one of these strategies. The aim of this study was assessing mothers’ practice about usage of A supplement for infants in 6 to 24 month infants of Semnan city.
In this cross - sectional study 400 mothers who referred to Semnan health centers in 2013-2014 (Semnan, Iran) were included the study via convenience sampling. The practice was studied in three area. Once the performance of the mother in the field of feeding of the supplementation to infants was desirable that she fed the infant by supplement in the day prior to referring. Favorable condition in terms of onset time of the supplement, starting it since 15th of birth, and finally on the dosage of it, has been used as order of 1 cc per day.
85.4% of participant mothers in this study had optimal practice in terms of the administration of supplement. About onset time, practice of 91.6% of mothers and in related to supplement amount, practice of 79.7% of them was optimal. There was a significant relationship between mothers’ practice about supplement onset time and nationality (OR=8.24, 95% ,CI: 2.48-27.43,P= 0.001) and between supplement amount and fathers’ education (P= 0.001) .There was not significant relationship between mothers’ performance about feeding supplement to infant and mother's age, mother's education, father's education, mother's and father's job, infant's gender, birth rank, mother’s nationality, condition of referring to health center and the place of receiving child care. The most common reason of undesirable mothers’ practice about feeding A supplement was amnesia (79.2%).
Mother's practice, related to the regular feeding supplement to infants and the strict observance of its amount need more attention. In this regard, the effective and continuous education of mothers and increasing their awareness, particularly mothers belonging to low literacy husbands, are significant and workable along with other facilities such as free distribution of supplements and their quality improvement.