Parents' reasons for not attending parental education groups in antenatal and child health care: A qualitative study

How should online antenatal and parenting education be structured according to parents? Qualitative findings from a mixed-methods retrospective study

BACKGROUND

Over the past 50 years, the content and structure of antenatal education classes have varied to reflect social norms of the time, the setting and context in which they have been held and who has facilitated them. In recent times, antenatal and parenting education classes have become a smorgasbord of information, offering a range of diverse content. Where and how parents-to-be may access formal antenatal and parenting education classes are also varied. Even before the lockdown challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic, many antenatal and parenting education classes had become available and accessible online. While the flexibility and accessibility of this option are apparent, scant research to date has reported on parents' experiences of undertaking online antenatal education.

OBJECTIVES

The objectives of this study were to explore new parents' experiences of engaging in online antenatal education, and to discover how consumers of online antenatal education perceive it should be designed and delivered.

DESIGN/METHODS

A mixed-methods design was used for this study, which was conducted with 294 past enrolees in a range of online antenatal and early parenting education programmes delivered by one private provider in Australia. The past enrolees were invited to participate in the study by email, wherein a link to an online information sheet and survey containing closed- and open-ended questions was provided. The responses to the open-ended questions that are reported in this article were analysed using a thematic approach that involved coding, sub-categorizing and then categorizing the data.

RESULTS

A total of 108 participants provided qualitative data about the delivery and design of online antenatal education and information. The data were captured in three themes: video control and content, accessibility and pre-/intra-programme support.

CONCLUSIONS

The results of this study provide important insights for the development of online antenatal education programmes and courses that will be of interest to antenatal educators, maternity services and maternity care policy developers. Specifically, millennial parents want trustworthy and accurate antenatal education that is delivered in a framework that aligns with and builds on adult-learning principles. The diversity of families and of expectant parents' learning styles is also important to recognize in antenatal education curricula.

Application Effect of Combining Image-Text Communication-Based Healthcare Education with Shifting of Attention on Child Patients Undergoing Inguinal Hernia Repair under General Anesthesia

Objective

To analyze the application effect of image-text communication-based healthcare education combined with shifting of attention on child patients undergoing inguinal hernia repair under general anesthesia.

Methods

A total of 110 child patients with inguinal hernia treated in our hospital from January 2020 to January 2022 were selected as the study subjects and divided into the control group (CG, routine intervention measures) and the research group (RG, image-text communication-based healthcare education combined with shifting of attention) according to their preoperative intervention plans, with 55 cases each. After surgery, the child patients' psychological status, crying and shouting situation, and occurrence of complications were evaluated to compare and analyze the intervention effect of the two groups.

Results

The child patients' positive rate and anxiety incidence rate of psychological status evaluation were obviously lower in RG than in CG (P < 0.05), and the daily frequency of crying and shouting was significantly lower in RG than in CG (P < 0.05); the single time of crying and shouting was significantly shorter in RG than in CG (P < 0.05); after surgery, child patients in the two groups had different degrees of infections, subcutaneous emphysema, and scrotal edema, but the total incidence rate of these complications was obviously lower in RG than in CG (P < 0.05); after surgery, no significant between-group difference in child patients' FLACC scores immediately after being transferred to the ward was observed (P > 0.05), and at postoperative 1 h, 3 h, and 5 h, the FLACC scores of RG were obviously lower than those of CG (P < 0.05); and according to the investigation results, the total satisfaction and number of very satisfied parents in RG were greatly higher than those in CG (P < 0.05).

Conclusion

Before child patients undergoing inguinal hernia repair under general anesthesia, implementing image-text communication-based healthcare education combined with shifting of attention can effectively improve the child patients' postoperative psychological status and crying and shouting situation and is conducive to preventing postoperative infections, pain, and other complications and promoting postoperative recovery. The combined intervention has potential utility in reducing child patients' high-risk adverse reactions during the perioperative period and ensuring smooth operation, which is generally recognized by the child patients' family members.

Parental-couple separation during the transition to parenthood

AIM

To evaluate factors associated with parental separation during the parenthood transition.

DESIGN

Prospective, longitudinal and explorative.

METHODS

This is a quantitative longitudinal study of N784 subjects throughout the pregnancy journey with multivariate regression analysis of survey data derived from three validated measurement scales; the Sense of Coherence scale, the Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support and the Perceived Quality of the Dyadic Relationship scale conducted 2014-2016.

RESULTS

N17 participants separated at 2 years. Parental separation was significantly greater for those women and partners with low or changing sense of coherence, perceived social support and perceived quality of the parental-couple relationship indexes. Partners with a change in sense of coherence (p: .003) and perceived quality of the parental-couple relationship (p: .020) between 1 week and 2 years were at greater risk for separation. Attending professional preparatory support with a partner for women (p: .013) and attending the "Inspirational Lecture" for partners (p: .046) were, to a lesser extent, associated with a risk of parental separation.

Child health care nurses' use of teaching practices and forms of knowledge episteme, techne and phronesis when leading parent education groups

This study explores child health care nurses' pedagogical knowledge when supporting parents in their parenthood using various teaching practices, that is how to organise and process the content during parent education groups in primary health care. The aim is to identify teaching practices used by child health care nurses and to analyse such practices with regard to Aristotle's three forms of knowledge to comprehensively examine child health care nurses' use of knowledge in practice. A qualitative methodological design alongside the analysis of video-recordings was used. The results showed that child health care nurses used four teaching practices: lecturing, demonstration, conversation and supervision. Their use of episteme was prominent, but they also seemed to master techne in combination with episteme during the first three teaching practices. During the conversation teaching practice, the child health nurses rarely succeeded. Consequently, they missed opportunities to identify mothers' expressed concerns and to act in the best interests of both the mothers and their infants by the use of phronesis. In health care, however, theoretical episteme is superordinate to productive knowledge or phronesis, which also became evident in this study. Nevertheless, more interactive pedagogical practices are needed if more use of phronesis is to become a reality in parent education groups.