Assessment of the effectiveness of childbirth education in Malawi

Abstract

A previous study has indicated that mothers are not satisfied with the amount of labour and childbirth information given in the hospital setting ( Malata, 2000 ). This has implications for how these information needs can be addressed through a childbirth education programme. These needs can be divided into three domains: antenatal; labour and birth; and postnatal needs. A sequential quasi-experimental design was used to assess the structured childbirth education programme that was subsequently launched. Healthy pregnant women of at least 30 weeks gestation were recruited and the final sample sizes were 104 and 105 for the control and intervention groups. The control group attended the normal antenatal clinic and the intervention group enrolled in a childbirth education programme in addition to the antenatal clinic education. Using a semi-structured questionnaire, the mean pre-test and post-test scores for the control group across the three domains were not significantly different from each other (P > 0.05). For the intervention group there were significant differences (P < 0.05) in the mean pre-test and post-test scores across the three domains. The results show that the childbirth education programme imparted knowledge to the intervention group who received more effective childbirth education.