Improving women's practices for reducing the severity of menopausal symptoms

Abstract

Background: Menopause is a physiological event in the women’s life that can strongly affect quality of life. More than 80% of women state that physical and psychological symptoms are commonly accompany menopause, with different degrees of severity and affect women’s health and wellbeing. The aim of the current study was to improve women's practices for reducing severity level of the menopausal symptoms. Subjects and methods: The study was conducted in the gynecological department in El-Minia general hospital in Egypt using quasi experimental research design with pre-post assessment on 150 women at 45 years. The data collection tools included an interviewing questioner, knowledge assessment tool, practical assessment tool and Menopause Specific Quality of Life Questionnaire used to assess the severity of menopausal symptoms. The study was achieved through three phases namely assessment, implementation and evaluation. Each menopausal woman was evaluated at the assessment phase, and two months after program implementation. Results: More than half of the women had unsatisfactory knowledge regarding to menopause, in addition (69.3%, 78%, 56% and 71.3%) of women had improper practices for their vasomotor, psychosocial, physical and sexual health complains respectively at pretest. There were statistically significant improvement in the reduction of the severity menopausal symptoms and improve women practice with common menopausal health complains at posttest ( p < .0001). Conclusions: Improving women’s practices can be effective in reducing the severity of menopausal symptoms. It is recommended that, health care providers need to play essential role in assessing women’s needs and increase women awareness through implementing proper health educational session about the menopausal age and how to dealing with common health complains associated with menopausal age.