Children's Services in the Developing World by Najat M'Jid Dwan Kaoukji

Author:Najat M'Jid, Dwan Kaoukji [Najat M'Jid, Dwan Kaoukji]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781351952217
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2017-03-02T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

Believing breastfeeding mothers should not fast 6.45 (2.44-17.06) 6.92 (2.53-18.90)

Believing fasting decreases breast-milk 6.24 (1.85-21.05) 6.21 (1.84-20.95)

Well-child care in health station 3.14 (1.33-7.44) 3.52 (1.44-8.54)

Giving supplements 2.82 (1.09-7.27) Not significant

Having multiple children 2.78 (1.23-6.28) 2.80 (1.22-6.38)

Having an older infant Not significant 2.97 (1.15-7.65)

RR, relative risk; CI, confidence interval.

Discussion

The Ramadan fast concerns billions of Muslims around the world and their health care providers. The purpose of this study was to identify the attitudes and practices regarding Ramadan fasting of mothers who were breastfeeding their infants. The study population consisted of mothers of infants aged i year or younger, interviewed consecutively during the last 10 days of Ramadan in a university-based well-child care clinic and a health station in Ankara. The Ministry of Health ran the health station, and general practitioners, midwives and nurses provided health care. The division of Social Paediatrics at the medical school ran the well-child clinic and paediatric residents and interns provided health care. Continuity of care was more likely in the health station in which one physician cared for all patients followed, whereas in the university clinic, paediatric residents were rotated. The health care station was situated in an impoverished part of town, and provided care for patients without health insurance. The university clinic required health insurance or payment from those attending. Although our sample was not a nationally representative sample, our results have shown that there were differences in the sociodemo-graphic characteristics between the two sites, indicating inclusion of two sociodemographically distinct populations within the city of Ankara.

We have found that 69% of breastfeeding mothers attending the health station and 42% of those attending the university clinic were fasting during Ramadan. We postulate that the rates will be even higher for mothers living in rural parts of Turkey. We believe that despite the flexibility that Islam has provided for nursing and pregnant mothers, fasting will be universally prominent and we therefore aim to draw the attention of child health care providers throughout the world to this.

We hypothesized that rates of fasting would be associated with sociodemo-graphic characteristics of the mothers, their investment in breastfeeding and beliefs on the effects of fasting on breastfeeding. Maternal age and family structure were not significantly associated with rates of fasting. Maternal education appeared as a significant variable in bivariate analyses. Although maternal education did not reach level of significance in a regression model, this may be due to fact that we have included measures of attitudes and beliefs that may be the intermediate steps between education and fasting while breastfeeding. Furthermore, a high rate (44%) of fasting by mothers with more than primary school education should alert health care providers to the possibility that, in Islamic cultures, more educated breastfeeding women might also be fasting. This finding needs to be re-examined in larger samples with higher cut-off points for maternal education.

We hypothesized that a mother’s investment in breastfeeding would be linked closely to whether or not she fasts during Ramadan. Therefore, we included questions on supplemental feeding in our questionnaire.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.