Accepted for/Published in: JMIR mHealth and uHealth
Date Submitted: Jun 3, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Jun 3, 2018 - Jul 29, 2018
Date Accepted: Oct 30, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
An assessment of impact of maternal education through text messaging: results from a cluster randomized trial in rural China
ABSTRACT
Background:
Attempts to use mobile phone text messaging to achieve positive results for a range of health issues have been made in recent years. Reports on the impact of maternal education program based on this widely available, inexpensive, and instant communication tool are sparse.
Objective:
To explore the impact of maternal education program through text messaging.
Methods:
We carried out a cluster randomized trial in a remote region in the Chinese province of Hunan between October 1, 2011 and December 31, 2012. We used county as the unit of cluster (a total of 10 counties), with half of the counties randomly allocated to the intervention arm (with maternal education material adapted from the World Health Organization being delivered by text messaging to village health workers and pregnant women alike) and the other half to the placebo arm (normal care without text messaging). Data on maternal and infant health outcomes and health behaviors were collected and compared between the two arms.
Results:
A total of 13,937 pregnant women completed the follow up and were included in the final analysis. The results showed no difference between the intervention arm and the placebo arm in maternal and infant health outcomes or health behaviors after taking cluster effect into consideration.
Conclusions:
Adequate resources should be secured to launch larger scale cluster randomized trials with smaller unit of cluster and more intensive implementing to confirm the benefits of the text messaging based maternal education program suggested by the present trial. Clinical Trial: We obtained approval from the Ottawa Hospital Research Ethics and Confidentiality Committee before commencing the proposed study (REB # 2011467-01H). We registered this trial in ClinicalTrials.gov Protocol Registration System (registration number: NCT01775150; https://register.clinicaltrials.gov). We followed the Consort (Consolidated Standards of Reporting Trials (CONSORT) 2010 statement: extension to cluster randomized trials (18) in the reporting of the trial.
Citation
Per the author's request the PDF is not available.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.