الفهرس 
AcknowledgmentOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Infants are the most precious resources and promise for nation’s future. Since the infant forms a major proportion of the population particularly in the less developed areas, the health progress of a country can be gauged by the proportion of infant death. Their survival, development and protection is the responsibility of both the family and the community. Thus concentration of care during the first year of life can contribute to the great improvement of infant’s health condition and great importance in the prevention of morbidity and decrease of mortality. Community health nurse play a vital and important role in delivering care to infants in the well baby clinics. The primary goal of nursing is to attain, regain or maintain health for all children. To achieve this goal nurses should be equipped with adequate knowledge, skills and competence regarding infant’s care to give efficient care to this particular time. The aim of the present study to determine the role of the nurse in caring of healthy infants attending Maternal and Child Health centers in Alexandria. This study was conducted at all MCH centers of the seven districts of Alexandria Governorate. All nurses working in well-baby clinics or assigned to provide care for healthy infant’s were included in the study. The total number was two hundred and twelve (212) nurses. Two techniques were applied in collecting the information required: first, they were subjected to structured interview sheet for their personal, social data, knowledge and practices about some activities regarding infant care. Secondly; observation checklist was constructed for the nurses while performing their functions. The checklist categorized the tasks forming the activities expected to be performed for the infant in the well-baby clinic. The results of the present study revealed that knowledge and practices of nurses regarding infant’s care are adequate in some aspects and inadequate in another. As regards collective knowledge score, only 10.4 of nurses have the required knowledge, 22.2 have average while two third of them did not have enough knowledge. The mean knowledge score = 76.67 ? 18.18. The knowledge of nurses regarding growth show that about two third of them had high knowledge score. The majority of nurses if not all had a satisfactory knowledge about the importance of growth monitoring, definition of growth and the growth chart. While the minority of nurses had required knowledge about the anthropometric measurement needed for growth monitoring and characteristics of normal weight curve on the growth chart. As regards nurses knowledge about development the majority of them had high score. There was a high percentage of nurses with correct knowledge about the definition of development, normal range of age of head balance, lifting head and chest, sitting without support and crawling. In concerning to vaccination knowledge score, only one third of nurses had required knowledge, while two third of them laid between average and low knowledge score. As regards the importance of child vaccination, handling the remaining vaccines a high percentage of them had a complete correct knowledge. While the majority of the nurses had incomplete correct knowledge about causes of damage of the vaccines. There was a satisfactory percentages of the studied nurses with complete correct knowledge about the compulsory vaccination schedule in the first year of life regarding name, age, dose, route of administration and number of does for all types of vaccines except the vaccination storage in the refrigerator. While the majority had incomplete correct knowledge about dealing with the normal reactions or side effects of BCG and DPT vaccine. As regards measles vaccine side effect and dealing with it, the high percentage had wrong knowledge.