To Assess the Awareness about Safe Food among Patients and their Attenders; A Cross Sectional study in Tertiary Care Hospital of Indore City

Dr Madhuri Inamdar, Dr Ashfaq Modiwala, Dr Ajit Deshpande,
Dr Rajshekhar R. Wavare

Department of Community Medicine, Sri Aurobindo Medical College and Postgraduate Institute, Indore- Ujjain State Highway, Indore- 453555, Madhya Pradesh, India.

ABSTRACT

Background: Unsafe food poses global health threats, endangering everyone. Infants, young children, pregnant women, the elderly and those with an underlying illness are particularly vulnerable. Objective: To assess the awareness of safe food among patients and their attenders that came in outpatient department in the selected tertiary care hospital. Methodology: A cross-sectional study conducted among 546 study subjects where 279 (51.1%) were patients who came for the first time, at the time of survey and 267 (48.9%) were attenders who came with their respective patient were selected randomly and interviewed using modified WHO pro-forma. Result: It shows that mean percentage score for the good awareness was 50.23%. While comparing among study subjects it was found that overall awareness was higher among attenders. Awareness regarding safe food was found to be extremely significant (p < 0.001) among attenders while compared with patients in the categories such as food is not always safe to eat, if it smells ok and looks good with p-value (p=0.001), followed by there are some microorganism that are useful for making good food and drinks with p-value (p=0.001) and how to prevent cross-contamination with p-value (p=0.001) respectively. Conclusion: The lack of awareness regarding safe food was being served as potential risk in our tertiary hospital. There is an urgent need of training programme for patients and their attenders that came do the OPD departments of the tertiary care hospital.

Keywords: NA