The Effect of Educational Intervention on Selection of Delivery Method Based on Health Belief Model

Introduction: pregnancy is a natural process that can lead to fatal accidents and serious injuries to the mother and fetus. when there is no possibility of vaginal delivery for the mother and there is a possible risk to the mother and children, cesarean delivery is performed. materials and methods: this was an experimental study that was done on pregnant women who were referred to health centers of yazd city. the samples were 130 first pregnant mothers who were divided into two groups by random sampling (65 case groups and 65 control group). the data were collected by a researcher making a questionnaire including 4 sections. at first, two groups completed the questionnaires and then the intervention was conducted for the case group based on the health belief model. about 2 months after intervention, two groups completed the questionnaires twice. the data were analyzed with spss18 using mann-whitney, kruskal-wallis and chi-square tests. results: in this study, the mean age of women was 24.36 ± 3.73 and the mean gestational age 31.53 ±2.35. the results showed that there was a significant difference between case and control groups after intervention in perceived susceptibility (p=0.001), perceived threat (p=0.001), perceived benefit (p=0.01), perceived barrier (p=0.01) and knowledge (p=0.001). conclusion: in this study educational intervention based on health belief model increased the awareness of pregnant women, but, it has not been effective on their performance because many factors other than knowledge are involved in the choice of delivery method.