The Effect of Two Different Self-Assessment Methods for Fetal Movement Monitoring on Maternal Psychosocial Status

Overview

Antenatal care is essential for a successful delivery, a healthy baby and a happy mother. The main aim of antenatal care is to take appropriate interventions to assess, protect and improve maternal and fetal health during pregnancy. There are many methods to assess fetal health during pregnancy, such as ultrasonography (USG) and non stress test (NST). Along with these methods, maternal perception and counting of fetal movements is the only method that can be easily used by the mother without the need for clinicians or equipment. When a pregnant woman begins to feel fetal movements, it is one of the first signs of fetal life and is considered an indicator of fetal well-being. Decrease or absence of fetal movements has been stated to be an important parameter in the assessment of fetal health and may be associated with the risk of intrauterine fetal death. Therefore, feeling and counting of fetal movements is the basis for the assessment of fetal health.

Two methods are recommended for the identification of fetal movements. These are the Cardiff method and the Sadovsky method. In the assessment of fetal health, not only the number of movements per unit of time is important, but also the strength and nature of these movements. To take this into account, in 2012 Radestad introduced another method of observing the character of the movement, called "Mindfetalness". The method is based on women who develop maternal awareness of the health of the foetus and note the quality of the perceived movements. The method requires the mother to lie on her left side while her baby is awake and focus for 15 minutes on exactly how the baby is moving, taking into account the strength, type and frequency of movement. However, the number of fetal movements is not counted during this time period. This method, which helps women to note fetal movements in order to minimise and/or eliminate adverse birth outcomes, is also reported to cause unnecessary stress to the mother, as with other methods.Although there are studies reporting that counting fetal movements contributes to maternal attachment by increasing the possibility of connecting with the unborn baby, there are also studies that found no difference in maternal-fetal attachment scores. However, it is thought that focusing on the quality rather than the quantity of movements will increase the opportunity to connect with the fetus. There is no previous comparison in the literature between a self-assessment method that focuses on qualitative variables and a counting method to measure fetal movements. Although there is one study that used both methods, this study did not differentiate between experimental and control groups, but used the crossover method and tested both methods on the same pregnant women. Therefore, our study was planned to determine the effect of fetal movement counting with two different self-assessment methods on prenatal attachment and psychosocial status.