Study protocol for reducing childbirth fear: a midwife-led psycho-education intervention

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
File version
Author(s)
Fenwick, Jennifer
Gamble, Jenny
Creedy, Debra K
Buist, Anne
Turkstra, Erika
Sneddon, Anne
Scuffham, Paul A
Ryding, Elsa L
Jarrett, Vivian
Toohill, Jocelyn
Primary Supervisor
Other Supervisors
Editor(s)
Date
2013
Size

276809 bytes

File type(s)

application/pdf

Location
Abstract

Background: Childbirth fear has received considerable attention in Scandinavian countries, and the United Kingdom, but not in Australia. For first-time mothers, fear is often linked to a perceived lack of control and disbelief in the body's ability to give birth safely, whereas multiparous women may be fearful as a result of previous negative and/or traumatic birth experiences. There have been few well-designed intervention studies that test interventions to address women's childbirth fear, support normal birth, and diminish the possibility of a negative birth experience. Methods/design: Pregnant women in their second trimester of pregnancy will be recruited and screened from antenatal clinics in Queensland, Australia. Women reporting high childbirth fear will be randomly allocated to the intervention or control group. The psycho-educational intervention is offered by midwives over the telephone at 24 and 34 weeks of pregnancy. The intervention aims to review birth expectations, work through distressing elements of childbirth, discuss strategies to develop support networks, affirm that negative childbirth events can be managed and develop a birth plan. Women in the control group will receive standard care offered by the public funded maternity services in Australia. All women will receive an information booklet on childbirth choices. Data will be collected at recruitment during the second trimester, 36 weeks of pregnancy, and 4-6 weeks after birth. Discussion: This study aims to test the efficacy of a brief, midwife-led psycho-education counselling (known as BELIEF: Birth Emotions - Looking to Improve Expectant Fear) to reduce women's childbirth fear. 1) Relative to controls, women receiving BELIEF will report lower levels of childbirth fear at term; 2) less decisional conflict; 3) less depressive symptoms; 4) better childbirth self-efficacy; and 5) improved health and obstetric outcomes.

Journal Title

BMC pregnancy and childbirth

Conference Title
Book Title
Edition
Volume

13

Issue
Thesis Type
Degree Program
School
Publisher link
Patent number
Funder(s)
Grant identifier(s)
Rights Statement
Rights Statement

© 2013 Fenwick et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Item Access Status
Note

Page numbers are not for citation purposes. Instead, this article has the unique article number of 190.

Access the data
Related item(s)
Subject

Nursing

Reproductive medicine

Midwifery

Persistent link to this record
Citation
Collections