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Infant and young child feeding counseling: An intervention study
Objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of an integrated infant and young child feeding counseling course for transforming the knowledge, attitudes and practices of pediatricians and nutritionists working for the municipal health system of São Paulo, Brazil.
Methods: A randomized intervention study enrolling 29 professionals in the intervention group and 27 in the control group. Interviewers were trained in advance to collect data on the professionals working at health centers, before and 2 months after the intervention. Three research instruments were used, the first was to assess the profile of each professional, the second assessed their knowledge and the third was a clinical observation protocol. Analysis was performed using the Kruskal-Wallis test for independent samples and the Tukey method.
Results: The results for the knowledge questionnaire showed improvements in the intervention group (p<0.001) for the whole questionnaire and for questions on breastfeeding (p = 0.004); HIV and infant and young child feeding (p = 0.049); complementary feeding (p = 0.012); and counseling in infant and young child feeding (p = 0.004). In terms of performance, it was observed that the intervention group had significantly improved their dietary anamnesis after the intervention (p < 0.001).
Conclusions: This course effectively promoted an increase in knowledge and improvements in dietary anamnesis performance, but the same was not true of counseling skills