Standard home-based newborn care practice and associated factors among mothers in Ethiopia: A systematic review and meta-analysis

Abstract

Newborn care refers to the standard care provided to the baby in the postnatal period. Mother can provide this standard care in their home before or after discharge from a health facility. Despite an ample amount of primary studies on the level of standard home-based newborn care practices in Ethiopia, the findings are inconsistent, and the major determinants of standard practice remain unknown. This study aims to pool the level of standard home-based newborn care practices in Ethiopia. A systematic literature search was conducted in PubMed, Science Direct, Google Scholar, and Institutional repositories. Two authors completed the screening, selection, quality assessment, and data extraction. Both qualitative synthesis and meta-analysis were conducted to aggregate evidence. To estimate the pooled effect size, a random-effects meta-analysis was conducted in Stata 17. Heterogeneity was assessed using forest plots and an I-squared test. Sensitivity and subgroup analyses were done to investigate the sources of heterogeneity. We evaluated publication bias using Egger’s test and the funnel plot. In this review, 16 studies with a total of 9540 study participants were used in the meta-analysis. The final pooled proportion of the level of home-based care practice was 0.20 (95 % CI: 0.13–0.28). Factors include advice about newborn care 5.68 (95 % CI; 1.9–9.45), educational status primary 3.74 (95 % CI; 2.68–4.79), educational status secondary and above 2.19 (95 % CI; 1.39–2.99), and urban residence 1.57 (95 % CI; 1.42–1.71) place of delivery urban 2.84 (95 % CI; 1.35–4.33), bad obstetric history of the mother 4.97 (95 % CI; 1.55–8.39), previous antenatal care follow-up 4.09 (95 % CI; 1.08–7.10), community-based newborn care awareness 3.10 (95 % CI; 2.02–4.18), were significantly associated with standard home-based newborn care practice. The level of standard home-based newborn care practice was low in Ethiopia. We encourage the community health workers shall strengthen and give information to mothers about home-based newborn care practice, with a special focus on rural residents with no formal education.