Effect of Health Literacy Education on Self- Care in Pregnant Women: A Randomized Controlled Clinical Trial

Background: prenatal care reduces the risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes. the present study aimed to determine the effect of health literacy education on self-care in pregnant women. methods: the present randomized controlled clinical trial was conducted at two comprehensive health service centers in pakdasht (tehran province, iran) during january-june 2016. out of the ten comprehensive health service centers in the city, two centers were selected using a simple randomized sampling and randomly assigned to a control group and an intervention group. from each center, 40 pregnant women were recruited into the study. dedicated questionnaires on self-care and health literacy during pregnancy were developed by the author as data collection tool. the validity and reliability of the questionnaires were confirmed using the test-retest reliability method and by the opinion of ten experts, respectively. the questionnaires were completed before the intervention, and at 1 and 2 months after the intervention. the intervention consisted of four 45-minute educational sessions and group counseling. the data were analyzed using the spss software (version 16.0) with the independent t test, chi-square test, mann-whitney test, and repeated measures anova. p<0.05 was considered statistically significant. results: there was no significant difference between the groups before the intervention. however, 1 month after the intervention, there was a significant difference (p<0.001) in the mean scores of the total self-care and total health literacy between the control and intervention groups (65±6.23 versus 76.77±4.28 and 30.95±4.63 versus 40±3.54). similarly, there was a significant difference (p<0.001) between the mean scores 2 months after the intervention. conclusion: intervention for the promotion of physical and mental self-care during pregnancy should emphasize on increasing health literacy in computational comprehension, reading comprehension, and behavior.