Abstract

Introduction: Immunization against common infectious diseases is of great value in preventing early death in low aged children and is very effective and cost benefit worldwide. Health care officials and parents’ awareness of children vaccination program can be very effective in directing health service planning.

Objective: To evaluate the level of knowledge of mothers about vaccination as directed by civil vaccination program in Rasht.

Materials and Methods: This is a cross sectional- analytical study performed on mothers referred to health centers of Rasht from October, 2013 to June, 2014. Tool of research was questionnaire including parents and family demographic data, source of knowledge about vaccination and questions about knowledge of mothers. Sampling method was cluster based and 392 mothers were interviewed in health centers of Rasht. After data entry in SPSS version 18 software, descriptive statistics and T-test and ANOVA test were used for analysis

Results: Most mothers were between 25-29 years old (41.1%), and most of them vaccinated their children for the first time (62.2%). Most of them had diploma degree (48.2%), and were housewife (87%). We found that most of them had moderate knowledge and 15.6% had little knowledge and only 8.7% had good knowledge about vaccination. There was a significant relationship between knowledge of mothers and their education (P=0.032), their jobs (P=0.008), educational level of their husbands (P=0.014) and source of information (P=0.021).

Conclusion: Knowledge of mothers about vaccination in this study was moderate in most cases. Therefore, consulting programs on vaccination for mothers is suggested in our country. In doing so, optimizing health and educational grounds, besides training and promoting parents’ level of knowledge are recommended.