Abstract

- Introduction: Anaemia is one of the most important public health problems that persist worldwide, not only among pregnant women, and young children but also among the adolescents. The adolescents girl of today will be the Mother of tomorrow and if she is anaemic today she might give birth to low birth weight babies prone to infection with poor mental and physical development. With this backdrop, a study was planned and undertaken with the objective: To find out the baseline and post intervention knowledge of anaemia among school going adolescent girls. Materials and Methods: This is an institution based interventional study undertaken among 176 adolescent school girls of class VIII, IX and X of a rural school of West Bengal. Data was collected by predesigned pretested questionnaire, discussion on various aspects of Anaemia followed by application of the same questionnaire to elicit the improvement of knowledge. Result: The study population were adolescent girls with ages ranging from 12 to 16 years, with mean age 14.10 ± 1.15 years, majority belonging to Class IX(43.2%).There was a statistically significant improvement in Knowledge of anaemia following the awareness programme [t(df)= 20.241(175), p