Abstract:
Nutritional knowledge plays an important role in public health. However, there has been
general concern about the state of nutritional knowledge of nurses and clinicians in many
parts of the world. The aim of this study was to examine the nutrition knowledge, attitude
and practice of professional health workers at Morogoro Urban district. This was a
descriptive cross sectional study whereby one hundred and fifty five health workers (100
nurses and 55 clinicians) completed a self administered questionnaire. The response rate
was 58%. In addition, 40 health workers were interviewed and focus group discussion was
done to a group of nurses and a group of clinicians separately. The overall performance of
the respondents on the nutrition knowledge, attitude and practice was poor. Overall
nutrition knowledge scores were graded as poor. Clinician’s had a mean score of 42% and
nurses a mean score of 42%. Clinicians had higher scores (22%) with good and very good
nutrition scores than nurses (5%). The nutrition knowledge of most clinicians recruited for
this study was poor (53%) and mediocre in 38% of them, however, nutrition knowledge of
most nurses was mediocre (56%) and poor (40%). Respondents had concern on the
adequacy of their nutrition information as most of them rated their knowledge as
moderate. Furthermore respondents had a negative impression over the extent of over
nutrition in Tanzania. Although health workers regarded nutritional care as an important
component of their health delivery responsibility in nutrition counselling, only 17%
always provided nutrition counselling to patients. Barriers to nutrition counselling
included lack of time, equipment and human resources. This study indicates that there are
gaps in the nutrition knowledge of the nurses and clinicians and most of them may not
have the expertise to properly advise their patients or clients on the important aspects of nutrition.
