THE EFFECT OF CHILDBIRTH PREPARATION TRAINING CLASSES ON ATTITUDE OF WOMEN TOWARDS THE DELIVERY METHOD

The childbirth is one of the most crucial and important services provided by health care systems in all societies and like any other services, it should be provided in a proper way, with a lower cost and least physical-psychological complications. The choice of delivery type has a great impact on these kinds of physical and psychological complications. This research is a quasi-experimental study to determine the effect of education on the opinion of pregnant women in choosing the method of delivery. This study has been conducted among pregnant women admitted to the Fatemieh polyclinic in Urmia in 2015.
In this study, after approval of the ethics committee and obtaining the required permits, 160 pregnant women admitted to the Polyclinic Fatemiyeh in Urmia who fulfilled the inclusion criteria were chosen using convenience sampling, and they were divided randomly into two equal groups: intervention (education) and control (non-education) groups. To collect the data, a two-part self-administered questionnaire was utilized which had been previously prepared by the researcher and it included the personal information as well as the mindset assessment. The first part included demographic questions (26 questions) and mindset assessment on cesarean section (containing 15 items with Likert scale). The validity of this measurement tool and reliability of the results were determined by Content Validity and Cronbach's alpha methods, respectively. After completing the questionnaires, the data collected was entered into SPSS version 20, using descriptive statistics and chi-square tests were analyzed.
The mean age of pregnant women used as subjects were 29.04 ± 5.31. Statistically, no significant difference in demographic characteristics between the two groups was observed. Pregnant mother's opinion about labor practices in both intervention and control groups before the educational intervention showed no significant difference with Pvalue=0.536. The post-test scores were 45.61 in the control group and 29.44 is in the intervention group. With independent t-test, the difference of the mean scores of two groups after the intervention is statistically significant (Pvalue The results of this study showed that training can impact the pregnant women’s mindset and can change their opinion about cesarean section from a positive to a rather negative point of view. Therefore, it is recommended that the relevant authorities consider the necessary policy and plans to provide courses on preparation for childbirth, and also improve the quantity and quality of existing courses.