Level of education attainment and Parental Healthcare Seeking Behaviour for Children Diagnosed withTungiasis in Kikuyu constituency, Kiambu county, Kenya

The Level of formal education can influence one’s perceptions to causes and approaches to diseases and wellbeing. Communities or individuals who have high level quality education are of tenlikely to seek medical attention and treatment of certain diseases. This is because they are able to read and comprehend instruction hence could even self-medicate and appreciate the need for healthcare. This study investigated how the level of formal education attainment influenced parental health care seeking behaviour among parents whose children were diagnosed with Tungiasisinfection in endemic areas in Kenya. The study adopted a mixed mode research design. A representative sample of 327 parents whose children were diagnosed with Tungiasis were randomly drawn from clusters of households in the administrative wards in Kikuyu Subcounty, Kiambu; Kenya. This was done through cluster simple random sampling. Fifteen clusters were selected through simple random sampling from 25 clusters. This was followed by identifying 384 children who were suffering from tungiasis from these households and questionnaires were used to collect vital data. Response rate was high (95%) because only 12 parents (5%) withdrew from the study. A total of 327 parents of children diagnosed with Tungiasis were selected for the study. For those who were not able to fill the questionnaires, discussions and interviews facilitated qualitative data collection. Apart from the children the gender of the participants were 34.1% males while females were 65.9%. It was found that those with non-formal education were 3.3% (11) of the respondents. The respondents with an undergraduate degree or a college diploma/ Certificate were 42.8% (140) while 40.2% (131) of the respondents did not have any previous knowledge of Tungiasis until they encountered Tungiasis infections at home. The other 59.6% (196) had a previous knowledge of the disease. Majority (43 %) of the respondents admitted getting information about the disease from other secondary sources like the village talk, parents, books, journals and web recourses. The researchers found that the level of formal education attained by an individual influenced medical seeking behavior. The study found that the level of educational increased the visitations to health care facilities that were available in the constituency to seek medical care for children diagnosed with tungiasis infection.