Quality of Essential Newborn Care and its Associated Factors in Public Health Facilities of West Gujji, Oromia, Ethiopia: A Cross Sectional Study

Abstract Background: Assuring quality essential newborn care during delivery and postpartum period is critical in improving health outcome and decreasing mortality and morbidity in newborn. Moreover, research done in Ethiopia on this regard is limited.Hence,this study was done to identify the quality of essential newborn care and associated factors in public health facilities of West Gujji, Ethiopia. Objective: Objective of this study is to find out the quality of essential newborn care and associated factors in public health facilities. Methods: An institutional based cross sectional study was carried out from April 2020 to September 2020 in West Gujji, Ethiopia. The quality of newborn care facilitated by 200 health care workers on 200 newborns were observed during labor process and during postpartum period in the public health facilities. Structured questionnaire and checklists were deployed to gather data. The components on infrastructure, essential neonatal care and demographic variables as well as knowledge of health professionals were included. Therefore, the essential newborn care was considered good quality if the observational check list score was more than75%.One-way ANOVA F-test, student independent t-test and Karl Pearson correlation coefficient methods were utilized to find out the factors associated with quality of essential newborn care. Results: There were gap in the all-time accessibility of infrastructure, essential equipment, supplies and skilled health professionals.17.9% of the newborns received good quality newborn care. The independent variable such as work experience (F=155.36 p=0.001), training(t=17.34 p=0.001)and knowledge (r= 0.59 P=0.001) of health professionals had significant association with quality of essential new born care. Conclusion It is very essential to scale up the availability of resources and skilled health professionals and also enhance the quality of service rendered to the new born in order to reduce new-born mortality