Prevalence and Determinants of Delayed Newborn Bathing among Postnatal Mothers in a Rural Community of Northern Ghana

Globally, an estimated 2.7 million deaths, approximately 45% of under-five deaths occurred in the neonatal period in 2015. This trend led to the inability of many countries to achieve the Millennium Development Goal four (MDG 4) by 2015; hence the introduction of the Sustainable Development Goals(SDGs). Many studies have concluded that poor newborn care including early newborn bathing accounts for high levels of newborn deaths in lowmiddle income countries. This study therefore investigated the prevalence and determinants of delayed newborn bathing among postnatal mothers in Bawku Municipality in the Upper East Region of Ghana. As a community based study, a cross sectional study design was employed using multistage sampling technique to select 407 respondents. The Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 22 now known as Predictive Analytics Software (PASW) was used for data analysis. Generally, knowledge on delayed bathing was low as more than half of the respondents, 55% (n = 224) did not know that newborns are not supposed to be bathed until after 24hours of delivery. With regard to delayed bathing practice, only 22.6% (n = 92) of mothers bathed their newborn babies after 24 hours of delivery whereas 74.4% (n = 303) bathed their newborn babies before 24 hours of delivery. In the final analysis, delayed newborn bathing was predicted by level of education, place of delivery, ethnicity and socioeconomic class. These findings suggest that a substantial number of newborns still receive harmful newborn care practice and these practices are determined by several factors as stated above. Rigorous efforts should therefore be made by the Ministry of Health through the Ghana Health Service and other stakeholders to improve the uptake of recommended newborn care practices at the community.