Healthcare Seeking Behavior of Mothers or Care Givers for Common Childhood Illness of Under Five Years Children and Associated Factors in Kimbibit District, Ethiopia, 2020

Mothers' healthcare seeking behavior is a mother's response for sign and symptoms of her child illnesses to reduce severity, complication or even death after she recognized child's illness and if she reported visiting any health institutions. Healthcare seeking behavior of mothers or care givers for common childhood illness of under-five children in Kimbibit District, Ethiopia was assessed in this study. A community based cross-sectional study with mixed method approach was employed. Face to face interview for quantitative and focus group discussion for qualitative study were employed. Inductive thematic analysis was employed for qualitative data. For quantitative part, data was checked, cleaned, coded and entered into Epi Data version 3.1 and then, exported to SPSS version 20. Bivariable analysis was done and variables with p-value< 0.25 on bivariate analysis were entered to multivariable logistic regression model. Significance was checked at 95% CI with p<0.05. A total of 596 respondents with a response rate of 98.8% were participated in the study. The overall healthcare seeking behavior of mothers or care givers for common childhood illness was 87.5% (95% CI: 84.2%, 90.6%). Being urban residents (AOR=2.89; 95% CI=1.83-6.74), child's age 12 to 23 months (AOR=5.03; 95% CI=1.55-9.28), mothers who completed primary school (AOR=4.60: 95% CI; 3.21-6.53), median monthly family income ≥1000 ETB (AOR=4.53; 95% CI; 3.63-9.26), perceived severity of illness (AOR=2.58; 95% CI; 0.79-7.33) and distance from health facilities (AOR=6.59; 95% CI; 2.43-11.85) were the significant predictors of mothers’ healthcare seeking behavior for; common childhood illnesses. In this study; it was revealed that healthcare seeking from health facilities was delayed. Place of residence, educational status of mothers or care givers, child's age, average monthly income of family, perceived severity of illness and distance from health facilities were independent predictors of healthcare seeking behaviors.