Background of the study
Lactation makes considerable nutritional demands on the mother. Nutritional food during lactation period builds a healthy baby and protects the women’s own nutritional health. Inadequate diet for breast feeding mother can hurt the ability to take care of both mother and baby. These deficiencies should be avoided by improving the diet or providing supplements to the mother. Nutritional education should be made available to the postnatal mothers to improve their knowledge.
Objectives
· To determine the knowledge of postnatal mothers on postnatal diet.
· To find an association between the knowledge scores of postnatal mothers on postnatal diet with selected demographic variables.
· To develop and distribute an information booklet on postnatal diet
Method
A descriptive survey approach for was used for this study. The sample consisted of 60 postnatal mothers admitted in postnatal ward of YMCH, Mangalore. Sample was selected by purposive sampling technique. Structured interview schedule was used to collect the data from samples. The collected data was analyzed by using descriptive and inferential statistics.
Result
It was found that seventeen percentage of postnatal mothers had good knowledge, forty nine percentage of mothers had average knowledge, and thirty four percentage of women had poor knowledge. Overall mean and standard deviation was 5.733 & 1.071. There was no significant association between age, religion, educational status, occupation, type of family, monthly income, eating habits and previous knowledge
