THE EFFECT OF HEALTH INFORMATION-BASED EDUCATION INTERVENTION ON SELF-CARE ABILITY OF PREGNANT WOMEN WHO SMOKE

Educating pregnant women about the effects of smoking and its fetal risks can make it easier to quit smoking and consider health advice and practice self-care during pregnancy. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effect of educational intervention based on prescribing health information on the self-care ability of pregnant women who smoke.
Materials & Methods: This applied research was conducted using the quantitative (quasi-experimental) methodology with pre-test and post-test single group design. The study population consisted of all pregnant women who smoked and were referred to five gynecology hospitals in Tehran (Sarem, Mirza Koochak Khan, Hedayat, Akbarabadi, Arash) in 2019.133 subjects were selected by multi-stage clustering method. A researcher-made self-care ability questionnaire was used to collect the data after the determination of validity and reliability. Education was the intervention performed in this study and data were analyzed using SPSS software at a significance level of p˂0.05.
Results: The mean age of women was 30.12± 1.11 years and the mean gestational age was 26.18 ±3.86
weeks. The mean score of total self-care ability of pregnant women who smoked before intervention was 45.68 while it was 133.47 after the intervention. The mean of self-care capacity after intervention in the subscales of specific knowledge about pregnancy care was 36.11, awareness and attention to the adverse effects of smoking on maternal and fetal health was 40.76, effective care practices was 29.89 and search for care services and cooperation with the treatment group reached 26.71 which indicated the positive effect of the intervention.
Conclusion: According to the results, health system must consider the education of pregnant women about the risks of smoking during pregnancy and the effects of quitting it on increasing their self-care capacity.