JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Pregnancy serves as an important chapter for women since more attention needs to be paid to both physical and psychological health during this period. Adequate prenatal knowledge plays a key role in ensuring the health and safety of not only pregnant women but also their fetuses and the entire family. With the development of information technology, online prenatal education has been brought into focus due to its accessibility to comprehensive information, where high-quality health care is available to improve the quality of overall gestation period, labor process, perinatal outcomes and fetal outcomes.

Objective:

This study aims to investigate the present situation of online prenatal education in China and to predict future research direction of online prenatal education in China, therefore providing insights into improving the quality of health care of pregnant women.

Methods:

A national-based cross-sectional study was conducted on 590,912 pregnant women in 31 provincial administrations of mainland China between August 2018 and August 2019. These pregnant women were initially recruited from local hospitals across the nation during antenatal and postnatal periods via a web-based education school. Demographic information and course completion status (including the categories and the number of courses they completed) of all participants were collected.

Results:

A total of 590,912 pregnant women participated in online prenatal education in 2018. Among them, 188,508 (31.90%) participants were excluded because they did not complete any course, while 17,807 (3.01%) actively participated in online prenatal education and completed more than 100 courses. Among all five categories of online courses, almost half of pregnant women attended the first and second trimesters (49.63% and 50.46% respectively). We found that pregnant women were more concerned about gestational diet, fetal-related knowledge, and other precautions before the labor.

Conclusions:

In the era of digitalization where information is rapidly disseminated, online prenatal education could become a more convenient, productive and effective pathway for pregnant women, since it could help them to obtain adequate and optimal pregnancy-related information, and to gain more intellectual awareness about their pregnancy or preparation for pregnancy.