The effect of education given to women on women's genital hygiene behaviors and health literacy

This research; It is a pretest-posttest educational intervention study conducted to examine the effect of the genital hygiene education given to married women on women's genital hygiene behaviors and health literacy. The study was conducted at the Ministry of Health Pamuklar Family Health Center between December 2022 and April 2023. 120 women between the ages of 18-49 who met the criteria were included in the study. Genital hygiene training was given as an intervention to the intervention group, and standard monitoring was given to the control group. "Data Collection Form", "Genital Hygiene Behavior Scale" and Turkey Health Literacy Scale were used to collect data before the training. In the 1st month after the training, data were collected with the "Genital Hygiene Behavior Scale" and the Turkey Health Literacy Scale. For normally distributed data, t-test was applied to compare continuous quantitative data between two independent groups. For comparison of within-group measurements, dependent groups t-test was preferred. Wilcoxon Signed-Ranks test was used for intra-group comparisons of non-normally distributed quantitative variables, Pearson correlation test was used for relational analysis, and the statistical significance level was accepted as p<0.05 for all analyses. The difference between the pretest and posttest scores of the Genital Hygiene Behavior Scale and Turkey Health Literacy Scale of the group receiving genital hygiene training was found to be statistically significantly higher (p<0.05). At the same time, the Genital Hygiene Behavior Scale score of the intervention group was found to be significantly higher than the control group (p<0.01). It was concluded that the genital hygiene education given to women had a significant impact on women's genital hygiene behaviors and also had an impact on health literacy.