INVESTIGATION OF ADOLESCENT MOTHERS’ PRACTICES RELATED TO NEONATAL CARE

Özet

Objective: to investigate adolescent mothers’ practices related to neonatal care. Materials and Methods: descriptive study, using questionnaire delivered face to face to adolescent mothers 2 weeks after delivery. The current study included a sample of one hundred and eighteen adolescent mothers were eligible to participate, 100 agreed, living in the city of Kahramanmaras. Results: seventeen per cent were 15-16 years old and 83% were 17-19 years old. Seventy percent of the mothers had delivered vaginally. Seventy-one percent were registered as married. None of the mothers was working for financial gain and only 34% had health insurance. Some of the problems seen by the adolescent mothers in the babies were: distention in 89%, sticky eye 61%, umbilical infection 33%, diarrohoea 16%, constipation 20%, fever 24%, jaundice 63.0%, and moniliasis 44%. The risk of moniliasis in babies whose mothers cleaned the tip of the nipple with breast milk was 36 times higher than that of the babies whose mothers did nothing (B (regression coefficient)=36.000, p=0.020). It was seen that 10 of 100 adolescent mothers whose babies had fever had done nothing and waited for it to resolve itself, and 40 of them had applied medically incorrect practices when jaundice occurred in their babies. Ninety three of the mothers had received an adequate number of antenatal visits, and 24% had received education in pregnancy about neonatal care.Conclusions: these adolescent mothers experienced problems with neonatal care, and the education that they received during pregnancy and postnatal periods was inadequate on some subjects. These adolescent mothers had traditional attitudes about neonatal care. Key words: adolescent mothers; antenatal care; postnatal care; neonatal care; midwifery care