A Model of Health Literacy Skills Development for Preventing Preterm Birth of Pregnant Women in the Parental Schools under Health Region 4

Abstract

         Preterm birth in pregnant women is a crucial problem in maternal and child health work. It has direct effects towards physical conditions of baby and mother. Psychologically, it also causes stress and anxiety, including economic impact on the costs of consecutive care over a long period of time. This research and development aimed to develop and evaluate health literacy skills for preventing preterm birth in pregnant women for the Parental Schools under Health District No. 4. This research and development consisted of 2 phases: 1) Construct health literacy skills development model for preventing preterm birth for pregnant women; and 2) Operationalize and evaluate the health literacy skills development model for pregnant women. The samples were 60 pregnant women under prenatal care service at 7 hospitals. The data collection employed document analysis and questionnaire. The qualitative data was analyzed by content analysis, while the quantitative data was analyzed using descriptive statistics and the paired t-test.
          The study found that 1. The constructed model consisted of 11 processes including: 1) Communicate/invite and select pregnant women to participate in developing health literacy skills; 2) Persuade or motivate the target group to set goals for achieving full-term delivery; 3) Train information management skills in searching, filtering, and verifying the data; 4) Search the data for the topic “Problems of Preterm Birth”; 5) Search the data for the topic “How to Prevent Preterm Birth;” 6) Train inquiry skills; 7) Train decision-making skills; 8) Train decision-making with new problems; 9) Train application skills; 10) Review the trained skills. 11) Share good practices in preventing preterm birth without limitation of stories or examples. 2. After operationalizing the model, it was found that pregnant women showed higher literacy level than that of the pre-operationalizing of the model (p < .01) regarding preterm birth literacy, health literacy in preventing preterm birth, and preventive behaviors for preterm birth.