Influence of Decision Aids on the Choice of Mother-infant Rooming-in or Separation Care for Pregnant Women

Overview

During early postpartum period, mother-infant proximity is important for breastfeeding success. Rooming-in and separate care are both traditional practices. Rooming-in involves keeping the mother and the baby together in the same room after birth during hospitalization, whereas separate care keeps the baby in the hospital baby room. Shared decision making with decision aid (DA) is a way to provide information to pregnant women and to involve them in making decisions about their strategy on baby care. We have developed a DA to be administered during consultation for pregnant women, and conducted a randomized controlled trial (RCT) to evaluate the benefit of DA on decision making. The measurements include a battery of interview-based questionnaires and evaluations of decision regret. We expect the DA would benefit the intervention group in the aspects of knowledge and communication in choosing mother-baby care options.

Background: During early postpartum period, mother-infant proximity is important for breastfeeding success. Rooming-in and separate care are both traditional practices. Rooming-in involves keeping the mother and the baby together in the same room after birth during hospitalization, whereas separate care keeps the baby in the hospital baby room. Using decision aid (DA) is one way to provide information to pregnant women and to involve them in making decisions about their mother-baby care approaches. Patients and Methods: Decision aids are interventions designed to help pregnant women to choose their options of mother-baby care by providing information on those options and any potential outcome relevant to different mother-baby care options. Pregnant women considering mother-baby care approaches are randomly assigned to receive a DA or the standard oral information (control condition) during consultation. By asking the pregnant women to look into a series of paired-comparisons, the DA leads the pregnant women to consider the competing attributes (i.e. specific risks/benefits) of the care options. The primary outcomes are decision conflicts and decision-making difficulties after consultation. Hypothesis: The pregnant women of the DAs group are predicted to have lower decisional conflict scores before labor and lower decision regret scores after labor compared with controlled women. Our study hopes to support the efficacy of DAs in helping pregnant women to arrive at mother-care decision.