A Survey on Midwive's Opinions about Skin to Skin Contact between Mother and Newborn,Immediately after Birth; A Cross- Sectional Study

Successful breast feeding, especially using breast crawl in the first 5 minutes after birth, is one of the important factors for newborn’s health. Breast crawl is the way that can reduce newborns death rate; however it is not widely used in Iran. In this Analytic cross-sectional study, stratified sampling was applied to recruit 150 midwives from 16 hospitals who are responsible for delivery or newborns immediately after birth. Data collection was conducted using nineteen focus group discussion consisted of 6-12 participants. Discussions were held in hospitals’ calm environment for about 1:45’ - 2 hours. Also, a questionnaire was used as an instrument for collecting demographic information. Instructional leaflets, composed of five questions were distributed among the participants. The instruments’ validity was assessed through CVI and CVR methods. Content analysis, descriptive statistics and Chi-Square test were conducted in SPSS-18 to analyze the data. The findings of the research reveal that 98% of the midwives have used skin-to-skin contact from at least two to four minutes. Moreover, 58.9% and 57.4% of the obstetricians have considered the contact as breast crawl in educational and non-educational hospitals, respectively; 58.9% and 53.2% of them have used skin-to-skin contact whenever possible; 28.6% and 23.4% have placed the newborns on their mother’s abdomen to perform breast crawl; 44.6% and 33.3% applied such contact immediately after birth; and 67.9% and 85.1% are satisfied with their workplace environment, respectively. The results show that midwives are familiar with skin to skin contact and its benefits for both mother and newborn. However, they do not employ this method immediately after birth. There is an urgent need for more qualitative and quantitative studies to investigate the inhibitory factors.