Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Human Factors
Date Submitted: Jul 1, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Jul 5, 2019 - Jul 19, 2019
Date Accepted: Mar 3, 2020
Date Submitted to PubMed: May 27, 2020
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
A Qualitative User Study of a Maternal Text Message-based mHealth Intervention: MAMA South Africa
ABSTRACT
Background:
Using cell phones to support healthcare (mHealth) has been shown to improve health outcomes across a multitude of health specialties and across the world. Understanding mHealth user experiences can aid in understanding the ‘how and why’ an intervention was impactful. MAMA was a free maternal mHealth text messaging (SMS) service offered to pregnant women in Johannesburg, South Africa. We conducted focus group discussions with MAMA users to learn from their experiences with the program.
Objective:
To explore and understand the experiences of participants of the MAMA maternal mHealth service in order to identify key factors in its success.
Methods:
Fifteen prenatal and postnatal women attending public antenatal and postnatal care sites in central Johannesburg who were receiving free maternal health text messages (MAMA) participated in three focus group discussions. Predefined discussion topics included personal background, health care system experiences, text message program recruitment, acceptability, participant experiences and feedback.
Results:
Feedback regarding experiences with the health system was mixed with a few reports of positive experiences, and many more reports of negative experiences such as long waiting times, understaffed facilities and poor service. Overall acceptability for the maternal text message intervention was high. Participants reflected that messages were timely, written clearly and felt supportive. Participants reported sharing messages with friends and family.
Conclusions:
These findings suggest maternal mHealth interventions, delivered through text messages can provide timely, relevant, useful and supportive information to pregnant women and new mothers. Clinical Trial: The study was conducted under certificate M120649 from the Human Research Ethics Committee (Medical) at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.
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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.