Maternal health literacy and factors associated with incomplete immunization status of under two year children in Jhapa district of Nepal

Abstract

Immunization is known as the one of the most cost-effective public health interventions which helps to decrease the burden of child mortality and vaccine preventable diseases. Nearly one quarter of the world children are not protected from the common preventable disease. Globally almost 1.5 million of children die every year from the disease which is preventable by the vaccination. A cross sectional descriptive study was carried out to identify the health literacy status of mothers and to examine the association between health literacy of mother and incomplete immunization status of under two-year children. Multistage cluster sampling was used to select 398 mothers having under two-year children. Face to face interview was conducted using structured questionnaires. Chi-square test and multiple logistic regression were used to examine the association between the dependent and independent variables. The results showed that 29.9% had incomplete immunization and 70.1% had complete immunization. For the functional health literacy, 49.2% of mothers had marginal HL, 42.3% of mother had adequate HL, and 8.5% of mother had inadequate HL. For communicative health literacy, 65.1% of mother had marginal HL, 31.9% of mother had adequate HL, and 3% of mother had inadequate HL. For critical health literacy, 54.8% of mothers had marginal HL, 40.7% of mother had adequate HL, and 4.5% of mother had inadequate HL. In multiple logistic regression analysis, child age (AOR: 1.81 95%CI: 1.15-2.85), critical health literacy (AOR: 2.83 95%CI: 1.7-4.78), and knowledge (AOR: 1.71 95%CI: 1.06-2.74) were associated with the immunization status (p-value<0.05). The findings of this study suggest that in order to decrease the percentage of incomplete immunization, community-based health education is necessary which will increase the knowledge and health literacy level of mothers.