| dc.description.abstract | Malaria is a major public health challenge in Uganda especially among young children and pregnant women. It accounts for 30% of all outpatient attendances, 19% of all admissions and leads to 20% of all deaths in children aged below five years. Despite much effort to fight malaria, the efforts have been undermined by malaria parasites that develop resistance to the commonly available malaria drugs. A descriptive cross sectional study was therefore carried out in December to assess adherence to malaria treatment in children below the age of five years in Bukedea District.
A simple random sampling procedure was used to select the study site and subjects. Data was collected in Kachul village, Kateki village, Kawo village and Koena village where a total of 180 caregivers of children treated for malaria in the past two weeks were recruited, interviewed using a structured schedule. The results showed that though 73% of the caregivers had either good or very good knowledge on malaria, the knowledge on how to take medicine had gaps and was inadequate. Whereas 97.5% and 88.3% could tell the correct amount of drug to give and correct schedule respectively, there were deficiencies and knowledge gaps in areas like preparation of medicine for the children to take (78.3%), possible side effects (20.56%) and the dietary requirements that go along with medicine use (63.9%). Further, the composite adherence was low (46.8%).
There was a significant association between adherence and caregivers’ knowledge on malaria (P< 0.001), knowledge on the medicine dispensing instructions (P = 0.000), occupation of caregiver (P = 0.102), age of caregiver (P = 0.012), and vomiting (P = 0.029). The study concluded that adherence to treatment of malaria is low in this setting and rejected the research hypothesis that adherence to treatment of malaria was satisfactory among children aged below five years in Bukedea district.
To address adherence, the study recommends education to the community to boost knowledge on malaria which was positively associated with adherence, re- training health workers on communication skills for effective counseling on disease and treatment issues and development of communication materials, reinforcing the requirement that all first doses of the medicine be administered at the health facility before the child left, the children under treatment for malaria should be followed up after 2 days of treatment to monitor the response to treatment and sort out challenges that arose from treatment like replenishing the supply of medicine if needed and that the health managers take up adherence to malaria treatment as an urgent challenge and address the factors that hamper adherence. | en_US |
