Abstract:
Background: Despite progress made to treat acute common childhood illnesses in recent
years still Diarrhoea and ARI are among the five leading causes of infant mortality in the
developing countries including Ethiopia. Now a day the traditional trend which consider
provision of health care as primarily domain of health providers is slowly changed to current
trend which fully recognised the importance of mothers and the family in identifying, caring
for and preventing children's illnesses.
Objective: This study intends to assess health seeking behavior and its associated factors for
childhood illnesses at household level in Nekemte town.
Method: Community based cross-sectional study was conducted in Nekemte town, Eastern
Wollega Zone, Oromia Regional State, west Ethiopia from September 14-30, 2013 among
randomly selected 413 households using structured and pre-tested questionnaire and
qualitative methods. Analysis was done using SPSS version 16.0. Descriptive, bivariate and
multivariate logistic regression analyses were used to show frequency distributions and
associations.
Result: A total of 403 mothers or caretakers were involved in the study giving an overall
response rate of 97%. The study showed all children included in the study had history of
illness in their life. The overall appropriate health care seeking for the recent illness was only
112 (31.3%) which means taken to health facilities either public or private within 24 hours.
Perceived illness was not serious 18 (40%) thought getting well without treatment 18 (40%),
Lack of money 6 (13.4%) and lack of time 3 (6.6%) were the major reasons for not seeking
care. Educational status (OR=2.85, 95% CI (1.09, 7.46), income (OR= 3.13, 95% CI (1.27,
7.71) and source of information (OR 95% CI: 0.12(0.015, 0.873)) were identified as the
major predictors of appropriate health care seeking practices.
Conclusion and recommendation: There was low appropriate health care seeking practices
among mothers or caregivers which might have a significant contribution to malnutrition and
child mortality. Educational status and income appeared to be important variables predicting
health care seeking behaviour. Therefore, health care services should be provided by
minimum cost or for free to encourage families with low income. Effective health education
strategies to improve mothers’ health care seeking behaviours by reducing misperceptions.
