Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Research Protocols
Date Submitted: Feb 11, 2018
Open Peer Review Period: Feb 15, 2018 - Apr 24, 2018
Date Accepted: Apr 24, 2018
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
A Healthy Eating Education Program for Midwives to Investigate and Explore Their Knowledge, Understanding, and Confidence to Support Pregnant Women to Eat Healthily: Protocol for a Mixed-Methods Study
ABSTRACT
Background:
Nutrition and healthy eating behaviors during pregnancy are vitally important for the health of a mother and her developing baby. However, some midwives have reported a lack of evidence-based nutrition knowledge for providing information about healthy eating to women during pregnancy.
Objective:
In this study, the aim is to design and evaluate a healthy eating education program to enhance midwives’ knowledge, understanding, and confidence to support pregnant women in South Australia to make healthy eating choices.
Methods:
This mixed-methods study consists of two phases. The first phase, Phase 1, consists of an education program for midwives, “Healthy Eating in Pregnancy,†to be delivered through a workshop or webinar. Each midwife will attend one workshop or webinar, which will be approximately two hours in length. This program will be evaluated through pre-, immediate-, and post-educational questionnaires utilizing a website specifically designed for this study. The participants will be midwives who are members of the Australian College of Midwives and the Australian Nursing and Midwives Federation, and users of social media (eg, Facebook and Twitter) residing and employed in South Australia. Phase 2 will consist of semistructured interviews with a purposive sample of midwives. These interviews will be undertaken to gain an in-depth understanding of midwives’ views and how confident they feel educating pregnant women after receiving the healthy eating education. Interviews will be face-to-face or conducted by telephone with midwives who have participated in the healthy eating educational program.
Results:
A systematic review has previously been undertaken to inform this study protocol. This paper describes and discusses the protocol for this mixed-methods study, which will be completed in April 2019.
Conclusions:
The results from the systematic review suggest that there is clear justification to undertake this mixed-methods study to investigate and explore midwives’ knowledge, understanding and confidence to support healthy eating in pregnant women. The results and conclusions from the systematic review provided some guidance for the design and development of this study protocol. This mixed-methods study will address a gap in the literature. The results from quantitative and qualitative data sources in this proposed study will help to draw conclusions to address the research topic. Registered Report Identifier: RR1-10.2196/9861
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.