Published Paper Details:

Background of the study: Malnutrition is a "man-made disease" which often starts in the womb and ends in the tomb. The impact of malnutrition on children is that they get recurrent infections and tend to be at greater risk for illness and death and often results in delayed mental development, poor school performance and reduced intellectual capacity.1 One effective strategy to reduce malnutrition is to educate mothers of malnourished children about its causes, management and preventive measures. Improving mother's knowledge and awareness can promote appropriate feeding and timely healthcare-seeking behaviour, thereby contributing to a reduction in the prevalence of malnutrition among children. Objectives: To assess the level of knowledge regarding malnutrition, management and its prevention among mothers of malnutrition childre, Dharwad district. To evaluate the effectiveness of video assisted instructional programme regarding malnutrition, management and its prevention among mothers of malnutrition children in terms of gain in post test scores. To find out an association between pre-test knowledge scores with their selected socio-demographic variables. Methodology: An evaluative study was conducted among 40 mothers of malnutrition children residing at rural areas of Tegur, Dharwad district. Non probability, purposive sampling technique was used to select the sample. The data was collected using structured knowledge questionnaire. The research design used for the study was pre-experimental, one group pre-test post-test design. Results: The study results revealed that, majority of subjects in pre-test 08(20%) had good knowledge and 25(62.5%) had average knowledge and 07 (17.5%) had poor knowledge. Whereas after interactive session in post-test all of the subjects 40(100%) had good knowledge regarding malnutrition and its prevention. With regards to statistical association, there was an association between age and education of mother with their pre-test knowledge scores. Conclusion: The study concluded that the video assisted instructional program was effective in terms of gain in knowledge scores of the subjects regarding malnutrition, management & its prevention.