Evaluation of the effect of infant care education given to primiparous mothers in the early postpartum period on the role of motherhood and postpartum anxiety

The study was conducted with 60 primiparous mothers (experiment: 31; control:30) who were admitted to the Gynecology Service of a private hospital in Istanbul between September and November 2022 and met the research criteria. Both groups were visited at the 8th hour postpartum. Patient information form and personal information form were filled. The first modüle of the baby care training was given to the mothers in the experimental group. All women were revisited at the postpartum 24th hour. The experimental group mothers were given the 2nd modüle of the training and the general condition of the control group mothers was questioned. Experimental and control group mothers were asked to fill in the Postpartum Anxiety Scale. A phone call was made with the mothers in both groups on the 7th postpartum day. The education of the mothers in the experimental group was repeated with a phone call, and the general condition of the mothers in the control group was questioned. Both groups had the Barkin Maternity Function Scale and Postpartum Anxiety Scale filled online at the 6th week postpartum. The data were evaluated with the SPPS 21 program and the conformity of the data to the normal distribution was evaluated with the Shapiro Wilk test. Independent Sample T test and Paired Sample T test were used in the analysis of normally distributed data, and Mann Whitney U test was used in the analysis of non-normally distributed data.The groups were similar in terms of obstetric and socio-demographic characteristics. The difference between the experimental and control groups was found to be statistically significant (p<0.001). All sub-dimensions of the postpartum anxiety scale were found to be significant except for 'newborn well-being and safety anxiety'. (p<0.001). The level of significance found was found to be at the minimum level between the mean score of the mothers in the experimental and control groups. Baby care education was found to be very effective in gaining motherhood roles in primiparous mothers in the postpartum period. But it didn't lessen their anxiety. Primiparous women should be provided with baby care education and qualified care to reduce their anxiety in order to ensure that their postpartum period is more comfortable, with strong self-efficacy and more comfortable.