Background: The health and well-being of the child depends on the attainment of appropriate nutritional requirements which include breast or formula feeding followed by proper complementary feeding.
Objective: To assess the current awareness of pediatric health care providers at Shoag Governorate (Sohag General Hospital, Sohag Teaching Hospital, Elhelal Hospital and Gerga General Hospital) regarding complementary feeding practices.
Patients and Methods: This study is a comparative cross-sectional questionnaire-based study conducted among 234 health care providers (122 physicians and 112 nurses) working in pediatric departments of the above-mentioned hospitals in Sohag. The questionnaire consisted of 17 items based on the recent evidence-based clinical practice guidelines for complementary feeding practices in Egypt, June 2018. Data was collected over 12 months and coded manually and analyzed by using statistical package for social science version 25.
Results: The studied healthcare providers (both physicians & nurses) experience inadequate knowledge in several aspects of complementary feeding. For physicians, the main pitfalls regarding complementary feeding that deviated from the recommended guidelines were for: time of water introduction in breastfed infants (96.7%), honey introduction (92.6%), introduction of fruit juice (86%), advisable first food (64.8%), introduction of dairy products (59%), iron supplementation (59%) & water in non-breastfed infants (36.1%) respectively.
Conclusion: The present study demonstrated that knowledge of the studied pediatric health care providers is not optimum in several aspects of complementary feeding and need to be updated and enhanced by regular training courses and follow up in that field.