Contraceptive prevalence, prevalence of unmet need for family planning and its correlates among ever married females of 15-49 years age group in Kalutara District, Sri Lanka in 2010

Malwenna, Lalitha Indrani; Balasooriya, A

doi:10.4038/sljm.v28i1.120

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“…Out of the 12 MOH areas under the RDHS/Kalutara, all MOH areas with similar profiles and distinctly situated were grouped for the study, consisting of three MOH areas to one group for preventing contamination in the intervention component [15]. If the food establishment selected was not opened at the time, a repeat visit was made within the other days (most probably the next day), in which data collection was conducted in a particular MOH field.…”

Section: Study Settingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of health educational and participatory consumer group interventions in improving food handling practices in regional director of health services area Kalutara, Sri Lanka: non-randomized controlled community trial

Hirimuthugoda,

De Silva,

Abeykoon

2024

BMC Public Health

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Introduction Safe and nutritious food is the key to sustaining life and promoting good health. Unsafe food creates a vicious cycle of disease and malnutrition, particularly affecting infants, young children, the elderly, and the sick. Methods The study consisted of two phases, a descriptive cross-sectional study, and an intervention study. Both studies were conducted in the Regional Director of Health Services area, Kalutara, Sri Lanka. The descriptive cross-sectional study [food handlers (n = 904), food establishments (n = 421)] was conducted with the objective of determining factors associated with food handling practices among food handlers and in food establishments. The interventional study was a three-arm non-randomized controlled community trial (n = 50 per arm) with interventions of a participatory consumer group, educational package group, and control group. Results The food establishments assessment tool (FEAT) contained 11 domains including 75 items with more than a hundred assessment points with a guide to conduct an assessment of food handling. The descriptive cross-sectional study found that food handlers’ knowledge of food handling practices of storing milk, fish, and meat and fast-food items containing fish and meat was very poor (96.6%). Visibility of the last place of processing inside the food establishments to consumers was inadequate (19.2%) and the absence of the above-mentioned factor was significantly associated with an unsatisfactory level of food handling score in food establishments (p = 0.03). The unsatisfactory level of food handling was significantly higher among food establishments with non-personal ownership (p = 0.005), a low number of notices issued by legal authorities (p = 0.02), dereliction of duty by owners/managers on supervising (p < 0.001) and lack of medical certification to food handlers (p < 0.0001). Participatory consumer group intervention and educational package interventions were effective in improving food handling practices in food establishments and among food handlers (p < 0.0001). Two independent sample analysis using the Mann–Whitney U test showed, the best improvement in food handling practices was by participatory consumer group intervention (p < 0.0001) and the second was educational package intervention (p < 0.0001). Conclusions Knowledge and practices of food handling among participants were poor. A participatory consumer group is more effective than an educational package on improving food handling practices both among food handlers and in food establishments.

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Section: Study Settingmentioning

confidence: 99%