Assessing Essential New-Born Care Knowledge, Skills and Associated Factors among Nurses/Midwives in Zanzibar: A Cross-Sectional Study.

Background: Essential newborn care (ENC) is one of the significant strategies for neonatal survival, especially immediately after delivery. Nurses and midwives are the key healthcare providers who care for neonates immediately after birth, their knowledge and skills on ENC are very important for the preventable causes of neonatal deaths. Therefore, this study aimed to assess essential newborn care knowledge and skills among nurses/midwives in Zanzibar.

Methods: A hospital-based analytical cross-sectional study that included 246 nurses-midwives was conducted in Zanzibar from January to February 2021. The purposive sampling method was used to select district and regional hospitals. Simple random sampling was used to select primary health facilities. A systematic random sampling technique was used to select study participants. A standard structured self-administered questionnaire was used. Predictors of knowledge and skills of ENC were determined using Binary Logistic regression under multivariate analysis using SPSS version 23.0. P<.05 was considered to be significant.

Result: Among the total (246) participants, 89 (36.2%) and 66 (26.8%) had adequate knowledge and appropriate skills of ENC, respectively. Having a BSc in Nursing (AOR = 8.83, 95%CI = 2.00-38.96) and the presence of guidelines (AOR = 3.52, 95%CI = 1.59 -7.80) were significantly associated with knowledge of ENC. Residing in Pemba (AOR = 0.30, 95%CI = 0.11-0.80), availability of staff (AOR = 0.80, 95%CI = 0.02-0.32), adequate knowledge (AOR = 2.80, 95%CI = 1.15-6.84) were factors significantly associated with ENC skills.

Conclusion: Generally, nurses-midwives had suboptimal knowledge and skills on essential newborn care. Nurses-midwives are in urgent need of positive supportive supervision and low-dose- high-frequency skills training in ENC for the prevention of neonatal morbidity and mortality. Also, policymakers should be aware of this gap and should plan necessary interventions to close the gap to resecure newborns' survival.