Frequency of Breast feeding among working women of Multan.

摘要

Objectives: To determine the frequency of exclusive breast feeding amongworking women of Multan and to identify associations between socio demographic factorsand exclusive breast feeding. Study Design: Descriptive cross sectional study. Setting: Publicand private organizations of Multan city. Period: From 22-07-2017 to 25-05-2018. Material &Methods: The total 227 working women were enrolled by nonprobability purposive samplingtechnique. Data was collected on a predefined questionnaire. Results pertaining to rates werereported as frequencies and percentages. Post stratification Pearson chi square test wasapplied to identify significance of associations between socio demographic factors of workingwomen and exclusive breast feeding. Result: Mean age of our study cases was 28.24 ± 9.01.The frequency of exclusive breast feeding was noted as 44.5%. Post stratification Pearson chisquare test revealed statistically significant associations between of certain socio demographicfactors and exclusive breast feeding. Working women of younger than 30 years of age, urduspeaking ethnicity, banker by profession, living in nuclear family, more than 36 hours of workin a week, more than three children and shorter than two years of inter pregnancy interval wereless likely to practice exclusive breast feeding. Conclusion: The frequency of exclusive breastfeeding was below the rate of exclusive breast feeding in the general population of Pakistanas well as below those recommended by World Health Organization (WHO). Evaluations ofnational health policy and antenatal counseling sessions are needed to increase the rate ofexclusive breast feeding in working women.