Abstract

Infant mortality recorded for low- and middle- income countries remain unacceptably high despite all efforts to facilitate a reduction. Poor ante-natal preparations of mothers for the survival of their infants among others are believed to be responsible for this. We undertook to investigate how comprehension of health-information, and motivation aroused may be associated with readiness to implement infant-survival strategies among attendees at Primary Health Care infant- welfare clinics in rural communities of Ikenne Local Government Nigeria in order to better understand the dynamics of health-message delivery and effectiveness. The study adopted cross-sectional design and employed the 45-item Health-Information- Comprehension-Motivation and Readiness (H-ICMR) questionnaire developed for the study to measure level of message comprehension, motivation and readiness of mothers attending infant- welfare clinics to apply counsels to facilitate the survival of their infants. Two hundred and fourty five mothers were selected by a two-stage sampling of five health-centers from ten, followed by systematic random sampling of clinic attendees at the local health-centers following consent from participants. Rating scales were computed for these variables while ANOVA and regression analysis were applied to determine test of significance and independence respectively. The condition for tests of statistical significance was set at 5%. Mean age of respondents was 29.1±6.62 years and majority (85.8%) reported having some form of formal education. Respondents were of the Yoruba (49.0%), Igbo (27.8%) and various other (23.2%) ethnic expressions. A significant proportion (42.0%) claimed to have two children with 79(32.2%) just having their first live birth. A significant proportion of mothers (78.0%) were able to recall accurately information contained in the health-counsel offered. On a 35-point scale measuring Health-Information Comprehension and Motivation (H-ICM), mothers scored a mean of 18.36 ± 4.17. Readiness to implement infant survival strategies delivered through counseling offered at the clinic measured on a 27- point scale, reported a mean score of 14.66±4.87. Furthermore, there was a significant relationship between H-ICM and Readiness to apply health counsel sub-scale (R= 0.269; R2=0.072; P<0.001). Information Recall was similarly significantly associated with Readiness to act on information delivered (R= 0.231; R2=053; P<0.001), however, H-ICM (B=3.874; β=0.345; R2=0.119; p<0.001) was the predictor in a step-wise multiple regression analysis. Findings showed average readiness to implement infant-survival strategies. Mothers’ comprehension of information and motivation was poor and may account for persistence in morbidity among infants possibly due to inability to apply survival strategies communicated during clinic sessions. The study recommends that health personnel providing counselling at infant-welfare clinics should be more deliberate in planning health-information, and to disseminate well-structured health-messages that would be motivating in arousing conscious- awareness and deep desire to enhance infant-survival behaviour among mothers.