KNOWLEDGE, ATTITUDE AND PERCEPTION OF MOTHERS OF UNDER-FIVE REGARDING VACCINATION DURING HOUSE-TO-HOUSE IMMUNISATION CAMPAIGNS IN IBADAN NORTH-WEST LOCAL GOVERNMENT AREA, OYO STATE

Abstract

House-to-House Immunisation Campaigns are activities that provide children with an additional dose of vaccine and deliver other interventions where health workers build up extra efforts to focus on the community to offer immunisations to all individuals in a targeted population, regardless of the past immunisation status. However, there is a dearth of information on knowledge, attitude, and perception of vaccination during the house-to-house immunisation campaign. This study was designed to investigate this dearth among mothers of under-five towards vaccination during houseto- house immunisation campaigns in Ibadan North-West Local Government area (IBNWLGA), Ibadan, Oyo State. A descriptive cross-sectional study that employed a multistage sampling technique was done. Four wards were randomly selected from each zone, out of the eleven wards in IBNWLGA. Based on their distinctive features, settlements were selected from these wards using simple random sampling, simple random sampling was used to select the number of respondents. A pre-tested semi-structured interviewer-administered questionnaire was administered on three hundred and five respondents to document their socio-demographic characteristics, knowledge, attitude, and perception of house-to-house immunisation. Knowledge, attitude, and perception were measured on 9-point, 16-point, and 10-point scales respectively. Knowledge scores of ≤3, 4-6, 7-9 were rated poor, fair and good respectively. Attitude scores of ≤8 and >8 were rated negative and positive attitude respectively while perception scores ≤5 and >5 were rated negative and positive perception respectively. Data were analysed using descriptive statistics and Chi-square test at a 5% level of significance. The mean age of respondents was 30.6±6.1 years, 54.4% were Christians, the highest level of education for most of the respondents was secondary education (68.5%) and almost half were traders (45.2%) with 1.9±0.9 as mean years of marriage. Their mean parity and the number of under-five were 2.5±1.4, 1.2±0.4 respectively. Knowledge was generally poor as many (66.6%) had poor knowledge with mean score of 3.2±1.8, even though all of them had heard about the campaign, majority (83.9%) of them knew that the vaccine protect their children from diseases, only one- third of them were able to mention some of the vaccines correctly while majority (92.5%) claimed that proper information was not given by the vaccinators about the vaccines and whichoccupation, marital status and number of under-five showed significant statistical difference with the knowledge of respondents. The majority had a positive attitude (88.2%) and positive perception (84.6%) which ethnicity and level of education showed significant statistical difference respectively. One-fourth believe that frequent vaccination will make the vaccine ineffective (24.6%), overload immune system (25.9%) and one-fifth see no need for vaccination if the child is healthy. Respondents had poor knowledge of house-to-house immunisation but most had positive attitude and perception. There is a need for promotion of house-to-house immunisation campaign especially by educating mothers of under-five on its benefit to achieve optimal nationwide immunisation coverage.